"Gift" is a noun, "gifted" is an adjective, "give" is a verb.

I'm on my usage high horse again. It isn't all that high. As I've said before, I'm not some fusty pedant who worries about split infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions. I usually don't object to the verbing of nouns; note that I just used the verb "to verb." I do have my pet peeves, but I like to think that I limit them to instances where error will cause confusion.

Today, though, while reading a news report about a court decision concerning efforts to save Long Island College Hospital, which serves our community and where my daughter was born, I saw this:

The Wednesday ruling also required SUNY Downstate to account for the Othmer Endowment Fund by Sept. 20—a $130 million endowment gifted to LICH by the Othmer family.

--Sarah Matheson, "Ambulance Services Restored at Brooklyn's LICH," Epoch Times, September 6, 2013 (emphasis added).

The reason I've Italicized "gifted" in the quotation is that it's incorrectly used as a verb. It's an adjective that roughly means possessing greater than average intelligence or skill. The correct word in the context of the quoted sentence would be "given," the past participle of the verb "to give."

Why do I care? Because "gift" is a noun that doesn't need to be made into a verb, There's already a verb form, "give," that has no more letters than "gift," and therefore gives us no advantage in economy of expression. Consider, for example: "To verb a noun," thereby using the noun "verb" as a verb, has an advantage of brevity over "To make a noun into a verb." By contrast, "He gifted a book to his daughter" is longer, and clumsier, than "He gave a book to his daughter." Also, to use "gifted" as the past tense of "to gift" creates confusion with its use as an adjective. Would "a gifted child" mean a child blessed with talent, or one who was made available for adoption (not that they mightn't be the same)?

Addendum: I should mention that "give" is sometimes used as a noun, in a way that doesn't bother me. It's used as a synonym for "flexibility," as in, "There's some give in it."

Second addendum: Ugh!

It used to be. It's been dumbed down.

(Note the use of "dumb" as a verb. Very useful, I think.)

Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013.

I confess to having read very little of Seamus Heaney's poetry, just snippets quoted here and there. They were enticing; Heany is one of those poets and other writers I have an ongoing resolution to read. I own a copy of his widely praised translation of Beowulf, which I've promised to read aloud to my wife and daughter over what will necessarily be a period of some weeks.

I may even have been in the same room with Heaney without knowing who he was. One of my friends reported on Facebook that he was known to visit the Lion's Head when in New York.

A Catholic born and raised in Protestant dominated, and British ruled, Northern Ireland, Heaney had a sharp sense of the way tribal divisions affect communication. His poem "Whatever You  Say, Say Nothing," quoted in Saturday's New York Times obituary by Margalit Fox, concludes:

O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap,
Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,
Where half of us, as in a wooden horse
Were cabin'd and confined like wily Greeks,
Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.

Some of Heaney's compatriots found his work insufficiently engaged with the political conflict in Northern Ireland, condemning him as "accommodationist."  According to the Times obit, his reply was in an essay on Osip Mandelstam, exiled by Stalin:

“We live here in critical times ourselves, when the idea of poetry as an art is in danger of being overshadowed by a quest for poetry as a diagram of political attitudes,” [Heaney] wrote. “Some commentators have all the fussy literalism of an official from the ministry of truth.”

While most criitcs praised Heaney's work, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1995, he had his artistic, as well as political, detractors; those who, the Times observed, found his work "facile." The obit quotes Al Alvarez, in a 1980 review of Heaney's Field Work:

If Heaney really is the best we can do, then the whole troubled, exploratory thrust of modern poetry has been a diversion from the right true way. Eliot and his contemporaries, Lowell and his, Plath and hers had it all wrong: to try to make clearings of sense and discipline and style in the untamed, unfenced darkness was to mistake morbidity for inspiration.

The reference to "clearings of sense and discipline and style in the untamed, unfenced darkness" made me think of a poem I love, Wallace Stevens' "The Idea of Order at Key West." It begins with the image of a woman walking on the beach, singing, against the sound of surf. Stevens observed:

She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker.

The poem continues:

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Stevens took particularities--a woman singing on a beach; the lights on boats at anchor--and used them to illustrate how artifice imposes order (also see his "Anecdote of the Jar"), making, if you will, "clearings...in the untamed, unfenced darkness." Heaney gave us particularities, as in the short poem "Nerthus," which Alvarez quotes in its entirety:

For beauty, say an ash-fork staked in peat,
Its long grains gathering to the gouged split,

A seasoned, unsleeved taker of the weather,
Where kesh and loaning finger out to heather.

This poem includes an artifact--the ash-fork--that is simply there, a "taker of the weather." It does not impose any order or scheme, it was simply, in Heaney's view, beautiful. The natural features--peat, kesh, loaning, and heather--have their own beauty, but the ash-fork is beautiful in their context. It could be beautiful in some other context, or none, as well.

The modernists Alvarez contrasted to Heaney--Eliot, Lowell, and Plath--had in the critic's view what Stevens (whom I would add to that group), in the final stanza of "The Idea of Order at Key West" called "blessed rage for order."  (I believe that his "Connoisseur of Chaos" supports that argument.) Heaney didn't rage; he showed us what is there. He didn't idealize or prettify it. He could, for example in one poem, "The Skunk", that Alvarez cites as an example of Heaney at what, in the critic's view, is his best, compare his memory of his absent wife to the skunk that visits his porch in California:

It all came back to me last night, stirred
By the sootfall of your things at bedtime,
Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer
For the black plunge-line nightdress.

So, what do I prefer: the "rage for order" or the savor of the particular? My answer is typical for me: I prefer neither, and like both. I've sometimes been accused of wanting to have my cake and eat it, too. My answer is, "Who wouldn't?" To me, the modernists and the particularists are like the Thatcher brothers in Peter Wheelwright's As It Is On Earth, epistemological yin and yang, forever connected and completing a whole.

And, as an epitaph for Heaney--I promise to read Beowulf and more of your original poetry soon--I offer a paraphrase of Auden's elegy on Yeats:

Earth, receive an honored guest;
Seamus Heaney is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

But, though the vessel lie empty, let the poetry live on, and on... .

Addendum: Christopher Benfey remembers Heaney as a teacher in this New York Review of Books piece.

Photo: By Sean O'Connor, cropped by Sabahrat (File:Seamus Heaney.jpg) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Pete Seeger, "Solidarity Forever"

I was surprised and delighted when I walked into Key Food early this morning and heard this playing on the PA system. Some of my fellow shoppers appeared bemused when I started singing along.

Happy Labor Day.

Happy 68th, Van Morrison.

May there be many more happy days...and Wild Nights.

Addendum: Returning from my Sunday morning walk, with my iPod set on shuffle, I heard an almost subliminal guitar from my headphones, followed by Van's voice: "We were born before the wind... ."

The Blind Boys of Alabama, "Free at Last," live at the White House.

"Now is the time to make real the promise... ." Dr. Martin Luther KIng, Jr., August 28, 1963.

"Catnip Capers": a Terrytoons animation from 1940

A little weekend silliness. Some of us can remember when a visit to the movie theater began with a newsreel and an animated cartoon, along with previews of coming attractions, before the feature film. The cartoons I remember were mostly from Walt Disney (e.g. Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse) or Warner Brothers (e.g. Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig), but there was another studio, Terrytoons, that gave us some lesser known but interesting characters like Heckle and Jeckle, and a few that became TV staples like Mighty Mouse and Deputy Dawg. I don't know the name (if he had one) of the cat in the toon shown above. He bears some resemblance to Warner's Sylvester, and he has as much trouble with the mice as Sylvester does with Tweety. His adventures in this episode can only be described (despite its 1940 date) as psychedelic.

"C'mon Everybody": Led Zeppelin covers Eddie Cochran.

Led Zep does tribute to one of my favorite early rock artists, Eddie Cochran, at the Royal Albert Hall ("Now they know how many holes..."), London, on January 9, 1970.  In Jimmy Page's initial guitar attack I hear adumbration of the Ramones.

Here's Eddie doing his biggest hit, "Summertime Blues":


Eddie Cochran died in a car crash during a tour of England in 1960. He was 21 years old.

Okay, so I have this thing about dolphins.

I've had a soft spot for dolphins since I was seven years old and saw them sporting around the French liner Liberté as my mother and I crossed from England, where my father was then stationed, to visit my grandmother in Pennsylvania. My affection was solidified two years later when, back stateside and in the fourth grade, I read Children of the Sea, by Wilfrid S. Bronson, which told the story of a bottlenose dolphin to whom Bronson gave the generic name Tursiops (the species name is T. truncatus) from his birth in the shallow waters off Florida's Ten Thousand Islands, along the Gulf coast below Naples, through his travels with his mother and the rest of the pod around the Straits of Florida and northward into the Atlantic, with lots of accounts of his encounters with various and sometimes bizarre sea creatures. One of these encounters, with sharks, leaves him injured, and he finds refuge in Nassau harbor, the Bahamas. There he befriends a poor boy named (as I recall) Sam*, who dives for coins tossed into the water by passengers on cruise ships.

As I grew I learned more about dolphins: about Pelorus Jack, who guided boats through tricky waters in New Zealand; of their being said to have saved drowning humans; of the size and complexity of their brains; and of their having what seemed to be a language made of whistles and clicks. Recent research even indicates that they know each other by name.

From Bronson's book I learned that people in the Bahamas called bottlenose dolphins "herring hogs" because of their appetite for fish. As a child, I was horrified when I read an account by Dr. John Oliver La Gorce, then President of the National Geographic Society, of a fishing trip from Nassau in which he and his companions spotted "a kind of large porpoise[**] called a 'herring hog'" which, "because this species destroys many food fish," they harpooned him, hauled him to the boat and "dispatched him."  I was later to learn, through an old issue of National Geographic, that there had been a fishery for bottlenose dolphins on Hatteras Island, North Carolina, in which they were entangled in nets, hauled ashore, and butchered for sacs of oil in their foreheads; the oil was considered ideal for lubricating fine timepieces. (These sacs, I later learned, were essential to the dolphins' ability to echolocate, i.e. to use "sonar," as a means of spotting prey and underwater obstacles.) I was relieved to read that this fishery ended in 1929.

As I grew older and began to focus more on girls than on dolphins, I was happy to know that they had become protected by law, at least from deliberate slaughter. As a young adult, I was troubled to know that hundreds of thousands of dolphins were dying as collateral damage in commercial tuna fishing. I gave up tuna for a while, until the companies began putting "dolphin safe" labels on the cans. (Yes, I trusted.)

So, I went for some years not concerned about the well-being of dolphins, until I learned of the annual mass slaughter of dolphins in a cove near the fishing port of Taiji, Japan. This clip tells the story:


As the video reports, the scale of the killings has been declining in recent years. While this is heartening, a Scottish woman, Shona Lewendon, is leading a campaign to have it brought to a definitive close. Her leverage is Japan's bid for Tokyo as venue for the 2009 summer Olympics. and the International Olympic Committee's requirement that host nations adhere to environmental standards.
_________

 *My memory may be playing tricks with me here. Bronson was a prolific author and illustrator of children's books. Along with Children of the Sea, my elementary school library had three other of his: The Earth for Sam (geology and paleontology); The Sea for Sam (marine biology and oceanography); and The Stars for Sam (astronomy), all of which I checked out frequently. I seem to  recall in the forewords to these books that Bronson identified Sam as a nephew. I still recall that he also called the boy in Children of the Sea Sam.

**The words "dolphin" and "porpoise" are sometimes used interchangeably. Strictly speaking, they are two different types of small cetaceans, the class of strictly aquatic mammals that also includes whales.

Broken Darling, "Dust"

I found out about this song, and the band Broken Darling, through a comment on Brooklyn Heights Blog by a neighbor of mine whose nom de blog is "Remsen Street Dweller" (Remsen Street, although called "Remsen Drive" in the show, is known to us boomers as the home of Patty Lane, the character played by Patty Duke in her eponymous TV comedy; Remsen is one block south of Montague Street, where I live). Anyway, R.S.D., as a way of breaking from a tedious debate on "Open Thread Wednesday", posted a link to the YouTube video above, noting that Lia, the female vocalist, is a cousin. I watched it and posted back:

Oh. My. God. I love that song. I'm going to re-post it on my blog soon. This is a very talented group, and Lia is a darling indeed. It also helps that I'm a train buff.

Watching the video, one thinks "Appalachia," which it really is, but Wikipedia points out that Hunterdon County is considered part of the New York metropolitan region.

Yes, I'm very impressed by the song, which has the quality of coming straight from the heart, and the video, which is compelling. As a railfan, I found the scenes of disappearing trains and abandoned, weed-choked tracks particularly moving. Broken Darling is: Mark Bodino, vocals and guitar; George Mandala, guitar; Lia Menaker, vocals; Tony (no surname given), bass; and Jason Nagelberg, drums. You can hear their songs here.

Karl Junkersfeld's "A Tale of Two Bridges"

My Brooklyn Heights Blog colleague made this video. He gave it the title "A Tale of Two Bridges" because it includes scenes of and on both the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, but it concentrates on the latter, lesser known span. Lesser known, that is, until recently, according to this New York Times article. The Times piece attributes its new found popularity on the fact that its Brooklyn anchorage is next to DUMBO ("Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass"), a neighborhood that has undergone roughly the same evolution that SOHO in Manhattan did starting about two decades earlier: from decaying industrial area to place where artists could occupy cheap if not yet quite legal loft spaces to trendy Bohemian neighborhood to pricey place for the rich but hip, combined with office space for tech companies.

I have a particular affection for the Manhattan Bridge: it was my first crossing of any of the East River bridges. This happened in 1954, when I was eight years old.  My parents and I had just returned from England, where my dad, a U.S. Air Force officer, had been stationed for three years. We came by ship, and debarked at the Brooklyn Army Terminal. There we boarded a bus to Penn Station that took us by way of Flatbush Avenue (when we turned onto this broad thoroughfare my dad, an Indiana native who had spent some time in New York City early in World War Two, said "This is Flatbush": noticing some low-lying shrubbery in a planter box on the median, I thought I knew what he meant) to the Manhattan Bridge, where I was thrilled by the view of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and East River traffic.

The  Manhattan Bridge was the last of four East River bridges--the others, in order of completion, are the Brooklyn (1883), the Williamsburg (1903), the Queensboro (now officially the "Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge"; also known as the 59th Street Bridge and as such immortalized by Simon & Garfunkel; March, 1909)--to be completed. The Manhattan Bridge was partially opened late in 1909, but not fully opened until 1912. It was designed by Leon Moisseiff, who was also involved in the design of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia, but whose reputation was blotted by his having been the principal designer of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a.k.a. "Galloping Gertie" (caution: if you're at all nervous about bridges the linked video may give you nightmares, though it may also warm the hearts of dog lovers).

Update: there was a wild party on the Manhattan Bridge walkway Friday night. Read about it here; videos too!

No, you can't reach a crescendo. Or can you, if you're a famous writer?

Miles Hoffman, a fine fellow I'm sure, takes umbrage with F. Scott Fitzgerald, the historian James M. McPherson, George F. Will, William Safire, and others, for using some variant of the phrase "reach a crescendo." This strummed a mystic chord of memory for me. Sometime in my tween years, I read a Walt Disney comic in which Donald Duck got into a noise war with a neighbor. Donald decided to finish it off by turning his record player to top volume and putting on "the fortissimo crescendo from Bombpopoff's 'Eruption of Vesuvius.'" I was pretty sure there wasn't a real composer named Bombpopoff, but I couldn't resist mentioning this to my music teacher. He laughed, and said there could be no such thing as a "fortissimo crescendo." "Fortissimo," he said, means "as loud as it can get." "Crescendo" means "getting louder." Nothing can be as loud as possible and getting louder at the same time.

This, essentially, is Hoffman's argument. To say or write, "The battle reached a crescendo," is nonsensical. a crescendo is a process, not a completion. It may end at fortissimo, or somewhere below that, but once it gets there, it's not a crescendo anymore. I could only agree.

But then I read a letter to the Times editor by Jamie Apgar, of Berkeley, California, in part as follows:

I am disappointed by Mr. Hoffman’s article. “To reach a crescendo” is an idiom. Idioms are suited for neither syntactical analysis nor literal interpretation. ...

More broadly, the point of language is to convey meaning. I doubt that any of the sentences by the famous authors that Mr. Hoffman mentions are rendered opaque by including the “crescendo” idiom. They may indeed be clearer or more powerful because of the metaphor. I think that I’ll stick with Fitzgerald.

Well, to say, "The battle reached a fortissimo," seems silly and confusing. One could instead say, "reached a climax," thereby substituting a sexual reference for a musical one. Or, there's "reached its acme," which might bring to mind Wile E. Coyote.

Jamie Bernstein, daughter of Leonard Bernstein, wrote to the editor that she was "gratified indeed" by Hoffman's piece for its "elucidation on the word 'crescendo.'" She went on to suggest "a reason for the pervasiveness of the misuse":

I’m certain that it’s because the sound of the word so felicitously evokes the crashing of cymbals: “the crash at the end-o.”

Be that as it may, I'm inclined to agree with Apgar: "reach[ed] a crescendo" is one of those usages that, through repetition, has come to mean something specific to most readers, although it may be at variance to what musicians and students of music understand "crescendo" to mean. I suspect John McWhorter would concur. (You can read the full texts of Ms. Apgar's and Ms. Bernstein's letters here.)

Perhaps the best known example of a crescendo, one that extends for the entire length of the composition, is Ravel's Bolero. Anyway, I couldn't resist the opportunity to send you to another of my posts.

Image:Best Clip Art Blog.

A cliché captured on camera.

A gray catbird (Dumetella carolinensis) surveys an earthworm (probably Eisenoides sp.) early in the morning in Brooklyn Bridge Park. I've seen catbirds before on my walks through the Pier 1 section of the Park, where dense shrubbery and trees provide an ideal environment for them.

J.J. Cale, 1938-2013

J.J. Cale, the Oklahoma native singer and songwriter whose work was performed by Eric Clapton and Lynyrd Skynyrd, among many others, died today at 74. In the clip above, he performs "Call Me the Breeze," a song recorded by Skynyrd. He's accompanied on this version by Clapton.

Cale's "Tulsa Sound" (not his term) was an amalgam of blues, country, and rockabilly. It was a precursor to what is today called "alt country," "Americana," or "roots" music. He may have been an influence on the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and others in taking rock back toward its country music partial ancestry.

Richard Wagner, Götterdämmerung, Seigfried's Funeral March

Today is the bicentennial of Richard Wagner's birth. The clip above, thanks to mitjanus, is of Siegfried's Funeral March from Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), the fourth and climactic opera in Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, or as it's usually called in English, the "Ring Cycle." (Was it an influence on Tolkien? The author of The Lord of the Rings denied it, but as Alex Ross in The New Yorker argued, it almost certainly was.)

The performance is by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, directed by Klaus Tennstedt. The Sturm und Drang is momentarily broken at 5:50 when Tennstedt drops his baton.

Bing and the Duke: "St. Louis Blues."

In 1932, Bing Crosby recorded this with Duke Ellington and his orchestra. An early example of Irish soul music, anticipating The Commitments?

Thanks to old Lion's Head friend Mike Pearl for the link, and nicoley133 for the clip.

Rembrandt van Rijn, 1606-1669

Google's search engine start page today reminds me that this is the 407th anniversary of the birth of perhaps the most celebrated painter in the western canon, Rembrandt van Rijn. Above is a self portrait done when he was about 28. Note the brilliant (in both senses) use of illumination on his face and collar, the almost palpable fleshiness of his face and texture of his garment, and the intensity of his half-shaded eyes.

Although Rembrandt is best known for his portraiture, his landscapes are also sublime. The Mill (1645-48) again demonstrates his skillful use of light, as well as the delicacy and precision of his brushwork, as seen in the cirrus clouds at the top of the painting, the texture of the cliff face, and the woods on the far shore.

Addendum: Michael Sorgatz tells me they've just rehung the Rembrandt gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and that it's "fantastic."

Images: Self-Portrait, Wikipaintings; The Mill, Wikipedia.

Dolly, Faut y croire. Happy Bastille Day!

Dolly was one of France's most popular rock bands from the early 1990s until 2005, when their bassist, Mickaël "Micka" Chamberlin, died in a car crash. After that, the group stopped recording and touring, but later, the surviving three members--Emmanuelle "Manu" Monet, the charismatic lead vocalist and guitarist; drummer Thierry Lacroix; and guitarist Nicolas "Nico" Bonnière--added a new bassist and began performing as "Manu."

I once suggested, not entirely in jest, that the Mets ditch the inane "Meet the Mets" as their fight song, and replace it with Faut y croire, which roughly translates as "Ya gotta believe!"

Addendum: A friend asks this question on Facebook: "Why does it sound like they're saying 'delenda est' after the title lyric?" My reply: "Maybe they are."

I forgot to mention that there are Bastille Day festivities right here in my neck of the woods.

Michael Simmons, "As I Walk by the Moon"

My erstwhile Lion's Head drinking companion Michael Simmons, now living in L.A., has been a steady source of mostly music related material for this blog, including a clip of the song "Instant Forget" by his band Slewfoot that was very popular according to the stats I get from Google. Now I have a clip, thanks to Kassamiia (aka Tiina Bockrath), of a very young Michael's solo performance, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, of a lovely song titled "As I Walk by the Moon," which he wrote with Barry Parker. The audio is accompanied by a still photo of Michael by John Duke Kisch.

British Pathé Newsreel: S.S. United States wins the Blue Riband on her maiden voyage.

The Blue Riband? It's an award that is not likely ever to be given again. It was for the passenger ship that made the fastest crossings, both eastward and westward, of the Atlantic, measured between the Ambrose Lightship off New York harbor and Bishop's Rock off Cornwall, England. S.S. United States won it on her maiden voyage in 1952, and retired with the title as transatlantic jet service supplanted ships. Queen Mary 2 annually makes one or two  transatlantic voyages between  my beloved Brooklyn and Southampton, England, traditional home port for Cunard liner services. Designed for cruising, Queen Mary 2 is unlikely to challenge any speed records.

Unfortunately, the United States is now in danger of going for scrap. The S.S. United States Conservancy, headed by Susan Gibbs, granddaughter of William Francis Gibbs, the marine architect and engineer who designed the great ship, is trying to raise funds to save her.  I'm hoping she may be preserved as a floating museum and perhaps hotel at a pier along what used to be "ocean liner row" on the west side of Manhattan, where she used to dock.

Update: The Conservancy has a Facebook page. Please consider giving them a "like."

Messrs Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, and Usher, wish you a happy Fourth.

Shreve, Lamb and Harmon's 1931 masterpiece, still the world's tallest art deco building, is resplendent in its Independence Day illumination. William F. Lamb, the building's principal designer, used his  design for the 21 story Reynolds Building in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, completed in 1929, as a starting point for his ESB plans. He was also inspired by the 49 story Carew Tower in Cincinnati (W.W. Alschlager & Associates/Delano & Aldrich, 1930).

Here's Usher, in the ESB's gorgeous lobby, turning on the lights. Have a happy holiday!

Pirates best in MLB?

My Mets have been showing some signs of life lately, so my earlier speculation that they might give the 1962 Mets a run for the season loss record has pretty much gone a-glimmering. Right now, they're at bat and leading the D-backs 2-1 in the bottom of the seventh with the bases loaded and no outs, and there's a rain delay. If they manage to win, they'll be ten games under .500 and in fourth place in the NL East, a familiar place for them. I can take some comfort in the fact that the Yanks are now in the same position in the AL East.

This would seem to be a good time to stop thinking about baseball and concentrate on important stuff, like the question posed by Dennis Overbye in his New York Times column yesterday:

Is the truth of the world to be found in the ways things change, like the river that you cannot step into twice, or the ways they remain the same, like the law of gravity or, indeed, the name of that river?

Well, "the way things remain the same" brings me back, unhappily, to the Mets. But "the way things change" brings to mind this startling fact: the Pittsburgh Pirates now have the best record in Major League Baseball. I can remember, back in the late 1980s and early '90s, when the Pirates were a respectable team, my thinking, "If only the Mets could have Bobby Bonilla." Since 1992, when they finished first in the NL East (they have since been moved to the Central) the Pirates have had twenty straight losing seasons, an MLB record.

We're not quite to the All Star break yet, and things could change drastically between now and October. Still, I can't help but think about 1960 when the "Beat 'em Bucs!" Pirates, emerging from another long period of mediocrity, won the NL pennant, and took the heavily favored Yankees to game seven, decided by Bill Mazerowski's walk-off homer (see video above).

Should the Pirates win the Real Baseball League pennant, as a Pennsylvania native I'll root for them against just about any Phony Baseball League champion.  Possible exceptions are the Red Sox, out of spousal loyalty, and the Rays, out of old hometown loyalty, although Tampa had no Rays until long after I left and had formed my loyalty to the Mets.

Neil Young sings Ian Tyson's "Four Strong Winds." Happy Canada Day!

One great Canadian singer and songwriter performs a song by another, with some help from Willie Nelson.

The Texas Archives War

The statue in the photo above is of Angelina Eberly.  I'd never heard of her until I read Gail Collins's column Wendy and the Boys in Wednesday's New York Times. The column focuses on Texas State Senator Wendy Davis's filibuster that succeeded in stopping a bill that may have effectively outlawed all abortions in Texas. Ms. Collins began it thus:

There is an old saying that Texas is “heaven for men and dogs, but hell for women and oxen.” But the state’s history is chock-full of stories of female role models. Barbara Jordan. Ann Richards. In downtown Austin, there’s a statue of Angelina Eberly, heroine of the Texas Archives War of 1842, firing a cannon and looking about 7 feet tall.

Collins then says she doesn't have time to explain the Texas Archives War, although she goes on to say, "it's an extremely interesting story." It seemed most interesting to me, as my wife is an archivist, and through her I've met many other archivists and learned a little about that fascinating profession. ("So, you're an archivist. What exactly do you do?" my mother asked my wife-to-be. "I read other people's mail and I don't have to answer it," was the reply.) Although I once had a silly fantasy about a comic book series called Action Combat Archivists, the notion of an "Archives War" seemed, well, bizarre. I had to look it up. The Texas State Historical Association website tells the tale:

In March 1842 a division of the Mexican army under Gen. Rafael Vásquez appeared at San Antonio demanding the surrender of the town; the Texans were not prepared to resist and withdrew. On March 10 President Sam Houston called an emergency session of the Texas Congress. Fearing that the Mexicans would move on Austin, he named Houston as the meetingplace. The citizens of Austin, fearful that the president wished to make Houston the capital, formed a vigilante committee of residents and warned department heads that any attempt to move state papers would be met with armed resistance. President Houston called the Seventh Congress into session at Washington-on-the-Brazos and at the end of December 1842 sent a company of rangers under Col. Thomas I. Smith and Capt. Eli Chandler to Austin with orders to remove the archives but not to resort to bloodshed. The Austin vigilantes were unprepared for the raid, and the rangers loaded the archives in wagons and drove away, but not before Mrs. Angelina Eberly fired a cannon at them. On January 1, 1843 the vigilance committee, under Capt. Mark B. Lewis, seized a cannon from the arsenal and overtook the wagons at Kenney's Fort on Brushy Creek. Only a few shots were fired before the rangers gave up the papers in order to avoid bloodshed. The archives were returned to Austin and remained there unmolested until Austin became the capital again in 1844.

So, there you have it. A war in which the first shot was fired by a woman, and in which nobody gets killed, or even hurt. And all over archives. Well, to be fair, really over what was to be the capital of the then independent Republic of Texas. Another reason, along with Wendy Davis (and many others; see the addendum to this post), for me to love the Lone Star State.

The photo is from the home page of an Austin based "psychedelic Americana band" called Archive War.

Sounds of the Niagara Frontier: the Rockin' Rebels, John Fogerty, and Screamin' Dick Biondi.

"Wild Weekend" by the Rockin' Rebels was recorded in 1959 by two Buffalo DJs, Tom Shannon and Phil Todaro, for their Mar-Lee (named for their girlfiends) label. Shannon and Todaro had written "Wild Weekend" as a theme song for their radio show on WKBW. It became a regional hit in the Northeast, securing the band a spot on the Dick Clark show. In 1962, it was re-released on the nationally marketed Swan label, and in 1963 it became a major hit, reaching number eight on the pop charts. This makes it, to the best of my knowledge, the only top ten hit to have originated in Buffalo, a city with which I have some familiarity. You can get the tangled history of both the music and the band and a discography here.

John Fogerty isn't from Buffalo, but listen to "Rock and Roll Girls." Instrumentally, it's practically "Wild Weekend" redux from the get-go, opening with the same hooky run and with sax accompaniment that sounds very similar to the Rebels'. Fogerty nails it in the vocal toward the end of the song with these words:

If I had my way, I'd shuffle off to Buffalo, Sit by the lake, and watch the world go by....

WKBW, home of Shannon and Todaro, also had for a time one of America's best known DJs, Dick Biondi. There's a sample of Biondi's frenetic style in the clip above. Biondi's edgy humor--he adumbrated the "zoo" style that became widespread on pop radio in the '70s--was often directed at station management, which sometimes led to his being fired. He became best known when he moved from WKBW to another 50,000 Watt platform, Chicago's WLS. Later he had a gig with KRLA in Los Angeles.

Happy Father's Day; happy Bloomsday.

Today is Father's Day, so best wishes to all my fellow dads. This year it's also Bloomsday, the anniversary of the day in 1904 when Leopold Bloom (sketch by James Joyce at left), father of Milly and mourner of short-lived Rudy, makes his way through various encounters in Dublin, as described in Joyce's Ulysses. The novel also gives us short excursions into the worlds of Bloom's cheating wife Molly (the story climaxes, as it were, with her soliloquy while in the arms of her manager and lover, Blazes Boylan), and of Bloom's bachelor friend (and Joyce alter ego) Stephen Daedalus. Dermot McEvoy has these thoughts:

Happy Bloomsday! “YES!” said Molly Bloom. It’s a day for aimless wanderings, gorgonzola, and, perhaps, a trip to a cemetery—after a neat drop off the 40-Foot in Sandycove. In celebration listen to the brilliant Jonathan Brielle’s “River Liffey,” taken from his equally brilliant musical about James Joyce, Himself and Nora: [Hear it here.]

You can see and hear me reading an excerpt from Jim Quinn's restaurant guide Word of Mouth, which incorporates the Burton Restaurant scene from Ulysses, at a Bloomsday celebration two years ago. Then scroll down to get a much better Joyce reading; Molly Bloom's soliloquy (NSFW!) as interpreted by Aedin Moloney.

Van Dyke Parks, "Donovan's Colours."

Van Dyke Parkes is a musical genius who surprised and mostly delighted the rock crit world in 1968 with an album titled Song Cycle. My friend Michael Simmons calls it "The Great Overlooked Classic Of American Popular Music." I certainly overlooked it for many years. Before the album was released, one of the cuts, "Donovan's Colours" (video above), appeared pseudonymously as performed by "George Washington Brown." In his story linked above, Michael tells of his and his colleagues', and the members of Moby Grape's, efforts to figure out who GWB was. The Mobys at least had him sending his recordings to Parkes, who was then an in-demand L.A. studio musician. Parkes later said he had it released under a nom de guerre because he "craved anonymity." Here's the original "Colours" by Donovan: Parkes does a classical thing with the song. He begins with a statement of the theme, but at about 1:20 in the video at the top of this post the theme dissolves into variations. The theme is reasserted triumphally at about 2:50. Michael notes the similarity of the sound to that of a music box. I also sensed a similarity to that of a Trinidadian steel band, another musical style of which Parkes was fond. Donovan was also a fan of Trinidad's calypso music.

The (short) life of pie.

We were expecting company Sunday evening, so my wife made a good sized pie using rhubarb and strawberries sourced (maybe even curated) from our local Greenmarket. In the photo above, it's fresh from the oven.

  It didn't take long--maybe fifteen minutes--for six people to reduce it to this.

Then, quick as a wink, it was down to this.

Cape Cod photos: the walk to Skaket Beach and back.

Following our visit to Cape Cod Brewery on Saturday morning, and a satisfying pizza lunch, the sun came out. I decided to take a walk. This sign, near the end of the short road leading to our friends' house, pointed me in the right direction.

On the way to the beach, the road crossed a stream emerging from a swamp.

Farther along, I passed the Captain Linnell House, built in the 1850s by a very successful sea captain who, unfotunately, died in a tropical storm off the coast of Brazil before having much opportunity to enjoy it.

There was a brisk, chilly breeze, and the beach was nearly deserted. This was the view towards the southwest, and the upper arm of the Cape.

This was the view to the east., looking toward Wellfleet and Truro.

Heading back from the beach, I came to Wildflower Lane. What might be growing there?

There were these (can anyone identify?).

And, there was my old friend Rosa rugosa. 

This eastern box turtle had just made it safely across the road.

Azaleas were in bloom next to the road.

As I approached our friends' house, I saw a male American robin perched on a fence rail.

Just opposite our friends' door a mourning dove sat on crossbar.

Later we went shopping in downtown Orleans. We visited Main Street Wine & Gourmet, where I got this encouraging message.

Lou Reed and Sharon Jones

There was good and not so good news last week about two of my favorite musicians. The good news about Lou Reed was that he had a successful liver transplant and is recovering. The video above (based on the credits roll, it appears to have been made at St. Ann's Warehouse, in nearby DUMBO) is of Lou doing one of my favorites of his, "Sweet Jane," originally done with the Velvet Underground, and later on the great album Rock 'n' Roll Animal.

The not so good news is about Brooklyn's own Queen of Soul Sharon Jones. I learned through friend Eliot Wagner that she's been diagnosed with cancer. Fortunately, it's been detected at stage one, so the prognosis is optimistic.
 The video above is of Sharon doing her version of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land," including the often skipped over "Commie" third verse, and a fourth verse evidently of her own composition. You're in my prayers, Sharon.

Cape Cod Beer

On our Cape Cod weekend, rainy, chilly Friday begat rainy, chilly Saturday, so we headed down the Cape, around the elbow (see my description of Cape geography in my post about Truro Vineyards) to Hyannis, there to visit the Cape Cod Brewery. In the photo above, Tyler, who conducted our lecture and tasting with knowledge and panache, is approaching. The stainless steel tanks in the background are where the brewing is done.

We got an up close look at some brewing ingredients. This is crushed pale barley, which gives beer and ale their malt richness.

These are pelletized hops, which give the brews flavor. According to Tyler these are Chinook hops, native to the Pacific Northwest. The other two ingredients are yeast, which reacts with the barley to cause fermentation in the presence of the fourth, and most voluminous ingredient: water. "Our local water supply is very good," Tyler said. "We use it, and run it through a big Brita filter."

This is one of several brews we sampled. It's the amber ale, which has a deep red color. The brewery calls it "Red Right Return" after the navigational mnemonic that says to keep the red buoys to your right (or starboard) while entering a harbor. I liked it, as I did all of the brews we sampled, which included a blonde ale called "Beach Blonde" which had more flavor than I expected, an IPA, and a porter.

Unfortunately, Cape Cod Beer isn't available beyond an eighty mile radius of the Brewery, as it isn't Pasteurized, and has to be kept refrigerated. The next time we're up there, we'll take a cooler chest so we can bring some home.