Happy Holidays from the Strange Light Cafe

It Might Be Important

It’s the day before Thanksgiving. There is a ice storm outside, but it is warm in cozy in my room as I eat popcorn. Tomorrow I will have my first Thanksgiving dinner with Diva’s entire family -- my new family. Diva has been telling me for two weeks not to be nervous, “Just be yourself... just be yourself.” It is her mantra. It the past her ex-boy friends tried to put on airs and her family saw right through them. They just want people to be what they are -- and that is enough. I love them already.

A moment ago I was going through my notebook of drawings I have been doing to illustrate this blog. There was one that didn’t work out, I ripped it out of the book and was ready to crumple it up. I heard a voice scream, “Save that, it might be important.”

It was Diva, she wasn’t with me, but I head her voice inside my head. I stopped since I knew she was right, she always is. Just ask her, she will tell you as much. I once had all my old paintings tossed in a corner of my apartment, I gave some away the last time I moved and don’t look at the others. A few months ago she looked at them and insisted I enter two of them in an art exhibition here in Minnesota. I humored her. One painting won best in show, the other best realistic acrylic painting. Alright, she was right -- they weren’t as worthless as I thought. I can be a very hard critic when it comes to my own work.

I often do a lot of rough sketches until I get a design I like. I toss everything away and keep just the finished work. Diva pointed out that I shouldn’t since those might be important someday. It is funny, I am crazy about seeing artist’s early sketches or hearing the rough demos of songwriters -- yet I don’t treat my own work with that respect. Diva maybe right. Maybe? IS right. If I don’t treat myself and my work with respect why should I expect anyone else to?

I started a notebook a few months back where I save all of my early sketches. I will save this bad one too. For personal reasons I now think of them as my journal. They are one of the ways I talk to myself and work out emotional problems. Sarah Mclachlan once said she writes songs as a way of finding a place for something that is troubling her. It is a kind of therapy or exorcism.

I am also starting to feel this is my road forward, my place in this world. I strongly believe what Bob Dylan said that if you create it should be something that only you could create. Looking at my old paintings I don’t think that they are brimming with me. Looking at my new drawings they reflect a certain Vincent-ness. They are playful, silly, warm and looking at often serious things in a off-kilter, hopefully disarming way. They are very Vincent. I don’t look at them the way I look at my old paintings and begin to tear them apart: that hand isn’t right, that chin isn’t perfect. No, when I look at my new drawings I find myself smiling and nodding. Yeah, that is what I was feeling -- that’s me. And that is enough.

The Secret World of Teddy Bears

A child pointing his toy gun at his teddy bear. A naked woman on a couch with a similar toy. A German soldier in a trench cuddling his Ttddy bear. The world is full of Teddy bears and their small but reassuring warmth. We all need a teddy bear of some sort. There was an exhibition of photos of people and their teddy bears entitled “Partners (The Teddy Bear Project) in Munich in late 2003. The Canadian artist Ydessa Hendele hung them from ceiling to wall and in cases -- thousands of pictures from the innocent to vulgar and the funny to the grim.

At the end of the exhibition is one last room. It at first seems to be an empty room with just white walls. And then you notice a man kneeling in the middle of the floor, facing away from you. You go around to see what he is doing. It is a lifelike statue of Hitler, and it is then that it hits you: the show wasn’t about teddy bears at all. The exhibition was titled “Partners” because it was about the Jewish people and the German People before WW II. Looking around, the only way out is the way you came in. You return past all the photos you have just been smiling and pointing and chuckling at. They are now grim and frightening. The innocence is completely gone. Who were the soldiers, their families and kids and who are children of the gas chamber? With nothing but a teddy bear and a smile it is impossible to tell -- and that is a very unsettling glimpse into the playtime at the house of good and evil.

“Ydessa, The Bears and Ect” a film by Agnes Varda, French 2004

The Missing Parts of Great Songs Quiz

The Song Verse on the Back of a Milk Carton

If you were a songwriter in the first half of the twentieth century part of your songs have gone missing since you wrote them. Here is an example I found on a crushed milk carton in my mind just yesterday -- next to my own bad verse and “Lost in Space” reruns. I have heard this song all my life but I have never heard this part. Now I can‘t get it out of my freaking head. So I decided to torture you too:

When all the world
Is a hopeless jumble
And the raindrops tumble
All around

Heaven opens a magic lane
When all the clouds
Darken up the skyway
There’s a rainbow highway
To be found

Leading from your window pain
To a place behind the sun
Just a step beyond the rain...


What song is that from? You know it, really. No luck? Okay how about the next lines of the song:

Somewhere over the rainbow
Way up high
There’s a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby.

Ohhh, Judy, bluebirds, Toto, a tin man in need of a heart and a gay lion who wants it rough. You know it now, right? But that first bit wasn’t in the movie. No, it wasn't, but those are Yip Harburg’s lyrics for the first part of the song.

Here is another song, and it’s missing bit, professor music:

This day and age we are living in
Gives cause for apprehension
With speed and new invention
And things like third dimension

Yet we grow a trifle weary
For Mr. Einstein’s theory
So we must get down to earth at times
Relax, relieve the tension

No matter what the progress
Or what may yet be proved
The simple facts of life as such
They can not be removed...

What is the song? Nothing again -- right, unless you are Michael Feinstein or have all of his records, which I do. Here are the next lines -- and they will really help a lot:

You must remember this
A kiss is just a kiss
A sigh is just a sigh
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by...

Wait, you know it now: Bogart, that unhealthy bar full of second-hand smoke, Bergman, Casablanca and Nazis. Ah, Nazis -- nothing is more romantic than Nazis. But that wasn’t in the movie either. Nope, it wasn’t, but that is how the uncut song goes. So what gives? Why have big hunks of our favorite songs gone missing?

Well, first why were those bits written in the first place? Most of the standards were written for Broadway musicals. At the time, the songwriters were worried that if someone was in a normal conversation on stage and the next moment they were singing their hearts out, people in the audience would find it funny or jarring. To make the transition from talking to singing smoother, the songwriter would compose an introduction to the song that was meant to be half-sung, half-spoken so that the audience would be eased into the song.

That was great for the stage, where most of the standards were introduced, but soon radio and records came along. On those, time is at a premium. If they don’t skip to the good part right away, people would turn the knob and artists wouldn’t make any money. So that half-talked, half-sung opening was often dropped for records. Interestingly enough, “Over the Rainbow” was written not for the stage but for a movie, yet Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen still wrote an intro -- that was not used, which is a clue to why the introduction disappeared from even the musical by the forties.

Musicals had gone from being a musical review (where any song would do at any part of the play) to an integrated musical (where the song actually moved the story along and the songs were not interchangeable). You couldn’t have the cowboys in Oklahoma sing “We’re off to see the wizard,” unless you were going for a big laugh. With the musicals being tighter, and the songs part of the plot, it seemed natural for Dorothy to lean against a haystack and wish for a better place (no transition necessary). I mean, wouldn't you? Look at that awful black and white barnyard, it probably reeks of movie cow poop. And monochromatic crap is the worst kind, trust me, I know. I have been on the wrong side of that rainbow.

That said, there are two nuggets I hope never appear on a musical milk carton. They are intros as good as the songs themselves. They are amazing. The first one is so good that Frank Sinatra recorded it all by itself without the song it was meant to introduce. Which is saying a lot, since the song is Hoagy Carmichael’s standard “Stardust”. Here is just the introduction. Carmichael's lyricist, Mitchell Parish, creates a dream-like word painting that really does stand on it‘s own:

And now the purple dusk of twilight time
Steals across the meadows of my heart
High up in the sky the little stars climb
Always reminding me that we’re apart

You wander down the lane and far away
Leaving me a song that will not die
Love is now the stardust of yesterday
The music of the years gone by...

Here is another intro I love from the song “I Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry”:

The torch I carry is handsome
It’s worth it heartache in ransom
And when the twilight steals
I know how the lady in the harbor feels

A better expression of unrequited love you will never find.

Rapture and Sleep

It is almost midnight and I should be in bed -- but the hardest battle of the day awaits me: what do I listen to in bed? It is meditation for me -- it is freedom -- and it is a freaking hard decision.

Do I listen to something new someone sent me? If I hate it, I will lie awake plotting my revenge on the artist, the person who recommended them to me and that entire gender of music. Jewel’s music usually puts me to sleep so you’d think her lullaby CD would be perfect -- nope. Why? Yodeling. My inner child now needs therapy. Yet I just requested her latest CD AND her country CD from my library. I liked her first CD (Pieces of You) from bloody 1994 -- I am an optimist. Maybe her next one won’t suck.

Tonight I must choose wiser. Jill Sobule? I know her and she doesn't yodel. Good start. Before I met her, she seemed like a friend. She is now one of my favorite bipeds and my favorite songwriter. Pete Townsend? There is something so warm, yet unsentimental about his work, solo and with the Who that shines more and more in my mind. George Gershwin? His sense of longing reflects my own restlessness. Mozart? He is deceptively simple and full of wit. You mutter that he didn't laugh like he does in the movie Amadeus -- not really. You haven’t really listened to his music, it is full of laughter. Brian Wilson will make me cry and smile. Debussy will make me dream. Rodgers and Hart will make me laugh at the crap we do for love. Sinatra in the wee small hours of the morning is a lonely yet lovely walk.

You see my problem -- I am in love with so much music and a little fickle. I am a stalker fan of a hundred composers with new ones being added all the time. My collection is full of strange lights and I don’t know which one to fly to tonight. Which emotional world do I fuse with my own dreams and find the rapture that will quiet my over active mind? I may never get to bed at this rate.

No, This Is Dreaming

I was watching the Ken Burn’s documentary Jazz (2000) and one moment caught my attention:

Man: Where did you get your ideas from?

Duke Ellington: Ideas? I got a million dreams. That’s all I do is dream -- all the time.

Man: I thought you played piano.

Duke Ellington: No, this isn’t piano -- this is dreaming.

The Stocking

We all get discouraged. It is easy to ask if we are doing any good in this world. Is the light we are giving off providing anyone with warmth, joy or solace? A few nights ago I went to a concert by Tami Briggs. She is a talented harpist living in Minnesota and is licensed to provide hospitals, nursing homes and hospices with musical therapy.

Her decision to do so took courage. In the past, whenever she went into a hospital she fainted straight away. Luckily her first hospital gig was in an emergency room -- and she was reassured by the staff that if she was going to faint, that was the best place to do it.

Tami told amazing stories of the connections she has made over the years. They were all beautiful but one hit me more than any other. It was about a stocking. She held it up. It didn’t appear to be much, in fact when Tami got it, lost in a host of other gifts, she thought nothing of it: a plain Christmas stocking with lace around the top.

The next day she was going through her gifts and noticed a piece of paper in it. It was from the mother of a woman who had received a heart/lung transplant. Tami visited the woman three times in the hospital and played for her. Sadly, infection set it and the woman lost her fight.

The stocking that Tami had received was made from the woman’s favorite robe. It was a robe that reminded her mother of better times -- the laughter and warmth her daughter had given the world. The mother carefully cut it up and made stockings for those her daughter loved the most. It was a way of making sure that the daughter’s spirit continued to glow.

The night Tami opened the present, she hadn’t really received it (she was tired and not in the moment) but that morning she got it. Everyone who heard Tami in that auditorium got the gift too. I did. I cried. A Christmas stocking now reminds me what music means to people in the worst moments of their life -- and of that woman. Stockings are now full of loss, stars and rebirth. It reminds me of the amazing connections we can make everyday.

Tami Briggs
http://www.musicalreflections.com/

When it Rains...

A Child’s Halloween in Wails

I was a Woolworth ghoul. Each year, as a kid, my mom would take me to the Woolworth store and get me a treat (a candy wax harmonica I would almost play before devouring). Next she let me pick out my favorite monster mask -- kind of how I imagine a normal kid got to pick out a puppy. Sometimes I was a werewolf, other years Frankenstein's monster. They were my heroes -- and for one day a year I could look like a freak and not be teased. It didn’t matter that my hair wasn’t combed under the mask. Sure it was sweaty, it smelled like my face had been shoved into the vinyl dashboard of a 57 Buick and I couldn’t see crap -- but I was a happy freak.

I wore it to school with pride and sat next to the normal, lame kids -- you know, the ones without imagination -- like the chick who dressed as Pippi Longstocking -- AGAIN. Wow, pipe cleaners in her hair and a couple of fake freckles -- good costume, Sally. She wore in every year until she was like forty: the costume had gone from cute to genuinely disturbing.

In Jr, High a trauma happen that stopped me from ever wanting to dress up again. The principle decided to throw a Halloween party. At that age I was becoming an artsy-fartsy rebel and thought it was really stupid being humiliated to dress up like a little kid and parade around for the amusement of the teachers. So I didn’t dress the hell up. Well, they have ways in prison camps of breaking the hardest spirit: no costume, no party. The rebels like myself, who refused to play their game, had to sit in a cold room for the two hours that the normal kids (who had caved in) were off partying. Ironic: the people who were freaks 24/7 couldn’t go to the party celebrating THEIR holiday. It was only the one-day-a-year fake freaks who could go.

I didn’t want to dress up ever again. I would never go to a Halloween party ever. In my twisted teenage mind it was as if I was black and Halloween parties were minstrel shows to make fun of MY people. Those people in masks weren’t real freaks, like me -- they were insulting cartoons of my heroes and my culture. We had a Christmas party that year and I have often wondered, did the same brains responsible for the Halloween party rules have a special room for the Jewish, Muslim and Atheist kids while we celebrated the spirit of old Saint Nick? You can see why they put me in a “special” room to protect the normal kids. My questions have always gotten me in trouble. They still do.

This year Diva told me I had to dress up and go with her to a Halloween party. I didn’t hesitate, of coursed I’d go. Love prunes the dead branches of our lives.

After a few false starts I decided to choose the German expressionist movie The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. I would not be the good doctor. I would be the murderess thing in his box. As I applied the white and black make-up I felt free. I didn’t look like me. When Diva showed up, she was genuinely freaked out. I decided not to wear my glasses as we went from place to place since it destroyed the effect. We had a blast at our first two stops. It was getting rather late and Diva wanted to drop by a party thrown by someone from school that she hardly knew. The person gave her the address but no directions.

In Rochester street house numbers are a joke. 1223 6th Ave may be in front of you and you are looking for 1224 6th Ave. That is probably twenty miles away: a suspicious tar paper shack in the country where people have entered and have never been seen again.

Diva was bound and determine to find the Gein residence so we could burst in the door and be bludgeoned to death. I was game and all, but realized that without my glasses, I was getting motion sickness. As we spun around corner after corner, all I saw were blurry lights like someone was swinging a Christmas tree around me while spinning my chair. I kept burping and trying not to lose it. After a half an hour, Diva said she needed gas.

As she got out, she said. “And I’ll ask for directions!”

“No -- burp -- gurgle -- I think I’m going to be sick!!”

We went straight home, I took a shower, got the makeup off and tried to settle my stomach. If the night had gone flawlessly it wouldn’t have been me, now would it? The way it ended was so Vincent. I later found out that Diva’s favorite holiday is also Halloween -- but because of some traumas of her own, she hadn’t celebrated it in years either. Despite the whirling sensation and all, we got it back that night. Freaks in love is a wonderful thing.