Happy Birthdays

Today is a day of remarkable creativity: It is the 69th birthday of Billy Collins, the most widely-read American poet of our time, maybe of any time.  He has brought back humor to literate English poetry.  I first heard him on Prairie Home Companion about ten years ago and was absolutely delighted with his work: bought the books, bought the CD of him reading his work.  He was the Poet Laureate some time ago (under Clinton, I think), but how many people know who's the American Poet Laureate under any president?    The honor of his being Laureate was all ours, I think: that we had such a poet and that the politicians of our world knew about him.  Happy country, that.   Happy Birthday, Billy Collins, for all the listening and reading pleasure you've given me and all your other readers over the years.  You can listen to him read 3 of his poems here: 

And it's also the 80th birthday of Stephen Sondheim, our genius of the Broadway Musical stage.  Not only the composer of the music but also the writer of the lyrics, and lyrics that will break your heart and make you laugh and often at the same time.  How lucky I am to have been able to see productions of as many of his works as I have, and to have CD's of even the obscure ones (Merrily We Roll Along, Evening Primrose) easily available.  All this past week, there have been celebrations of his birthday in various formats and his fans talk about their favorite songs.  Since this is my blog, I get to pick my favorite songs.

But it's really almost impossible.  Tonight, these are my favorites, but tomorrow it might easily be three others.  I can't even pick my favorite show, although Into the Woods comes very close.  But some days it's overshadowed by the much less well-known Merrily We Roll Along.  And Bounce is also very close to my heart.  But then Sweeney Todd and Sunday in the Park with George are both pretty amazing.  And then comes the list of all the rest of them, not a loser in the pack, just some that are not quite as fantastically brilliant as some of the others.

I think sometimes of what it would be like not to have musical available in the ways it is to us.  I can't really imagine that life.  And now, you can find it all on Youtube.  Here are my three favorite Sondheim songs:  'Not a Day Goes By,' from Merrily We Roll Along; 'Move On,' from Sunday in the Park with George;  and 'No One is Alone,' from Into the Woods.  All three are performed by Bernadette Peters who knows how to do them.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Sondheim.  You have given all who love your music so many, many happy days over these years.  Thanks.

Play On and On

One of the things that friends in Los Angeles often ask me is whether I don’t miss all the wonderful cultural opportunities that a big city has to offer.  Mostly, I don’t, I’m afraid.  I guess that is partly because I spent many years of my life taking in such cultural opportunities that interested me and I don’t have any sense thus of being deprived.  I had my innings.  Also, both Ed and I are pretty much introverts so if the outer world doesn’t poke us, we can move along day to day being pretty oblivious to and of it.  And finally, problems with parking have always dimmed my interest in going to great events; that and the attendant crowds.

Of course, there is also the big city of Vancouver right next door which has plenty of cultural attractions, but in fact we rarely set foot in Vancouver.  The building in Vancouver I know best is the airport (and a fine airport it is), but that doesn’t speak well for my interest in Vancouver’s cultural bounty.  The truth is, I tend toward a view of the cultural world as being sort of limited to New York, London, Paris, and Los Angeles, and thus, with no justification whatsoever, don’t much even think of Vancouver.  One might reasonably say that I might apply the same standard to L.A., but I have seen some wonderful performances, concerts, general events in Los Angeles that make my heart, if not my brain, say otherwise.  

I like looking back on those events that seem more like yesterday than decades ago: the original A Little Night Music with Hermione Gingold and Glynnis Johns in NYC (and re-seen 25 years later in L.A., with Glynnis Johns now playing the Hermione Gingold role); Tony Perkins in Look Homeward, Angel, in NYC, in about 1956; a memorable Alan Bates in an unmemorable play in London in the 1980’s; the premiere of Steve Reich’s Desert Music, at UCLA; a touring company of Hair in 1968 in L.A.  And imagine this: I saw Jerry Lee Lewis as Iago in a musical version of Othello with Richie Havens in the title role.  What could beat that? And on.  I visit them; I don’t need more places to visit; they are enough.

And yet.  There is a Scottish fiddler named Alasdair Fraser whom Ed and I first saw perform on Robert Burns’ birthday maybe 20 years ago in some community hall in Newport Beach or someplace like that in southern California.  He was just amazing and we got ourselves on his email list at some point and, as a result, we’ve seen him play 4 or 5 times, here and there.  The last time was in a church hall in West Vancouver maybe 3 years ago.  He’s gotten older, but his music is as wondrous and energetic and inspiriting as ever.  Last month, I got an email with his current performance schedule and saw that, although he was not playing anywhere near me, he was playing near the 18-year-old granddaughter at UC Berkeley.  I thought about flying down to see him and taking her with me to that concert.  But then I thought again.

Instead, I wrote her with the information, told her to buy two tickets and take a friend, and let me know the costs.   A dutiful girl, she did what her grandmother told her to do.  I sent her a check for the tickets and something to drink afterwards, and she and a friend from her English class went to the concert and loved it, and also asked, ‘do you have his CD’s?’  (Yes, all of them.)  She reported, among other things, that she and her friend were the only people there under the age of 50.  And she still liked it. 

 Couldn’t have been better if we’d gone with her.  In fact, it’s probably better than if we had gone with her.  Send a young person to a concert that they’d never get to on their own.  Share your own memories and attachments.  There ought to be a foundation that promotes that kind of activity.

Cousin Caterpillar

Another Internet treasure hunt and a real treasure at the end. This morning, Ed was looking at one of those photo collections that somebody is always sending to somebody via the email and I looked up at the screen just as a funny picture of a dog and a hedgehog slid into place. Looking at the hedgehog (and thinking of hedgehog/groundhog/badger day having just passed), I remembered the wonderful, bouncy, funny song of the Incredible String Band, a U.K. band of the 60’s, and called ‘The Hedgehog Song.’ I once had a much-played LP of the album that included that song, but it went away 20+ years ago when I let go of all my vinyls and 33’s and LP’s and committed to CD’s. Lots of albums got replaced, but The Incredible String Band didn’t because, at least at the time, it wasn’t there in that format so that I could replace it.

Ed doesn’t remember the song; I try to sing it, but I can barely croak anymore, let alone get out a complex tune like that one (whose refrain begins ‘Oh, you know all the words, and you sung all the notes, but you never quite learned the song she sung’). On a flyer, I Googled ‘The Hedgehog Song’, and up came a YouTube with a static visual and the original album cut. What a treat! And there’s more like this if you can just remember song titles or lyrics. (How can we have lost sight of the ‘Minotaur Song’ over the past eight years???? Or ‘First Girl I Loved? ) I also found “My Cousin Caterpillar’ (also by The String Band), which begins with the immortal line (given the title), ‘My cousin has great changes coming one day…’ And ends, ‘Come on, Do Your Thing!’ That may perfectly capture how we felt in the 60’s, those of us who were doing a lot of feeling in the 60’s, anyway.

Inspiration for our times, maybe. We are certainly hoping for great changes and we could surely use them. It’s just not clear that we any longer have ‘a thing’ to do. But at least the String Band is on YouTube; there’s a comfort. Here and here. Just poke around and you’ll find the other titles too there on ‘related video’s’ at the YouTube site.

Playing Catch-Up

Eagles. Jeff at lilypoint.org says that the list of eagle nests is not publicly available (wisely) because eagles and their parts are in great demand on the black market, even though satisfying that demand is definitely illegal in almost all circumstances. He adds, ‘eagles are the most monitored animal in the world. WDFW has GPS locations on every single nest in the State, and the program has a 30 year history. That is why people like Stanton NW can't get away with just removing a nest and think that nobody will notice or be able to prove that a nest was there.’ The lilypoint.org site has extensive information about eagles and their nests, so that's the place to go for it.

Pandora. Someone mentioned this site and it occurred to me that people might not know about it or how it works. If you listen to internet radio, this is a wonderful resource. Pandora.com is a music site where you set up your own music ‘station.’ You do that by giving the site the name of someone whose music you like. In the commenter’s case, it was Bonnie Raitt. So, let’s say you, too, choose Bonnie Raitt for your first station. Pandora then plays Bonnie Raitt’s music for you, but also other performers who are similar in various ways to Raitt. If you disagree about the algorithm’s assessment, you can say, ‘NO,’ don’t play that song again, and if you disagree twice more about that performer's recordings, then the algorithm never again chooses that performer. You can have many different ‘stations’ based on different kinds of music/musicians, and you can also have something called ‘quick mix’ in which music from all your stations (or all the stations you choose at that moment) plays randomly. It is a wonderful way to hear music you know and love as well as music you might love if only you knew about it. No cost. The only downside I know of is that it is available to you only if you and your computer are both in the U.S.

A similar site that does work in Canada is jango.com. Its music algorithm, it seems to me, is not quite as good as Pandora’s, but when I’m in Canada, it’s plenty good enough.

Music to Someone's Ears

A friend who lives on the other side of the U.S.-Canadian border urges me by email to write in protest to the CBC. It seems that the CBC2 program that he used to listen to while driving home, which played Mozart to calm his weary and presumably frazzled brain, has been replaced by a new CBC2 radio program which plays the music of the DHKS, which appears to be pronounced ‘ducks’ and which appears to be the name of a band out of Winnipeg. My friend is not happy.

Probably none of us old folks is happy about this, even if we are not regular 5 p.m. Mozart listeners. The CBC, which in many ways is one of the crown jewels of Canada—even more than U.S. public radio is a crown jewel of U.S. radio broadcasting—has come upon hard times. The CBC is adequately funded by the government. It is not always having to beg listeners to give them money.

What the CBC is facing up to is a generational challenge. People who listen to CBC radio are old people. And if only old people listen to it, then the old people will eventually depart the radio scene in their grand departure from all scenes, and then the younger people will no longer be interested in funding the CBC. So the CBC embarked about eight years ago on a project to make its programming more relevant to younger people (and, alas, less relevant, to its long time and older listeners).

I have never been a big listener to CBC2, which is the classical radio channel that my friend is so unhappy about, but I surely have noted how the programming on CBC1 and 2 has changed. I used to listen to CBC1 much of the day, even though I could just as easily listen to U.S. public radio. But no longer since the Big Change. Programs about books and reading are replaced by programs about bands from Winnepeg; interviews and conversations with people involved in serious issues are replaced with interviews and conversations with singers and bands from the world of rock and contemporary popular music and people who blather about 'human interest' matters. I don’t even know the right words to categorize the bands. They’re not my mother’s music, for sure, and not mine, either; maybe not even my children’s, but possibly my grandchildren’s. Even a program that plays some of the best music on the CBC and hosted by a young-ish classical/jazz pianist who is a wonder in his knowledge of music and his ability to talk about it is cluttered about 40% of its running time with mindless babble that reminds me of Valley Girl talk. This program, ‘The Key of Charles,’ is one of the most schizophrenic radio music programs I’ve ever heard. I listen now and then and am always charmed by the actual music and appalled by the conversation. Maybe it’s the CBC’s attempt to keep both audiences attending. It does make me cringe, even as i continue to listen.

I heard someone talking on the radio a few months ago about some study showing that most people’s musical tastes solidify by the time they’re 35, and after that, they rarely buy CD’s or otherwise choose to listen to any one they didn’t listen to before that time. I mentally checked my own purchases and preferences and was pleased to identify quickly at least a half a dozen new people in my listening repertoire who showed up long after my 35th year. However, upon reconsideration, I realized that almost all the new people were actually old people: performers who were recording before I was 35 and I just hadn’t gotten around to listening to them until well after then. Miles Davis and Bill Evans, for example. And the few who didn’t fit that category? Well, Kristen Chenoweth who would have been the brightest star on Broadway if only she’d gotten there 20 or 30 years sooner; The Ahn Trio, whom I first heard playing Jimmy Hendrix’s ‘Rider in the Rain;’ and Eva Cassidy, who also is a singer of the 70’s who wasn’t born soon enough to have performed then. Madeleine Peyroux? Well, mostly she sounds like Billy Holladay, who was way before my thirties.

I guess the CBC is entitled, like the moving finger, to write and move on to the ‘DHKS.’ It’s just that us old ‘uns are stuck back at the beginning of the music.