Scottunder

Subtitles

I have begun to watch all movies with subtitles turned on. This is because a) I already watch a lot of subtitled foreign-language films but mostly b) as my brain deteriorates, it helps me follow the movie better. It's really helpful in a movie like Lord of the Rings, with all its odd proper nouns. Sauron? Saruman? What?

Soon, I will require my smartphone to provide subtitles to everyday encounters, like at the hardware store or on the phone with customer service. I'm sorry, your name is Saruman? Solomon? What?

(Live subtitles might not be so far off, as i wrote a lot of this post using the voice-recognition software built into Android. Other than fixing a few wrong words, and adding punctuation and capital letters, these are mostly words I didn't type.)

Today's ephemera: African Violets

I'm not a floriculturist like J. Lawrence Heinl, so I can't comment much on this 1953 guide to growing these flowers, but I've always liked the cover and the cute little anthropomorphic drawings inside.

Padding out several pages at the end are lists of varieties, with fine names like Mentor Boy, Dainty Maid, Blushing Maiden Supreme, and Amazon Purple Prince, as well as a whole set of hybrids "from Mrs. Wm. R. DuPont," including DuPont Blue, DuPont Lavender Pink, Mrs. W. K. DuPont, and Christina.

(Weird effect on scanning the cover, which has a dappled gray coloring. It looks odd on my monitor at some sizes, showing up with a interference pattern.)

Today's ephemera: Funeral cards

[NB: I'm neither endorsing nor mocking Christianity. I just like the art and tradition of these cards.]

Many years ago, when my Aunt Mary died, I picked up these funeral cards from a table outside the chapel where her services were held. I've only seen them at Catholic funerals, but perhaps they're more widespread than that.

Here's an article on funeral cards from Ancestry.com (they turn out to be an important source of genealogical information), and a source to buy any of a number of sets. Apparently, it used to be common to send these to those whom the family wished to invite to the funeral, but I've only ever seen them at the church or funeral home, given away as a memorial keepsake, or possibly a memento mori. Being greedy, I wanted the whole set. 

But, really, I think they have a beautiful, ethereal, reassuring quality to them. Surely, this is what heaven is like, they suggest to us.

Below, you can see what the back of Mary's card looks like. Also on the page are a Virgin of Guadalupe card from a different funeral (fittingly, it was for a Mexican-American woman who was my "second mom" growing up), and the front and back of a more general prayer card that has a kind of Eastern Orthodox look about it, which I think I found in a book.

     

     

How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll

So, first thing about How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: forget the title. Elijah Wald's recent book is not about the Beatles, and only barely about rock 'n' roll. However, its subtitle, "An Alternative History of American Popular Music," is accurate. Having not read other comprehensive pop music histories, I'll take his word on the alternative part, but it does coincide with the conventional wisdom I've received since my teens.

The CW is roughly thus: American popular music has undergone a hundred-year metamorphosis from complex, melodic, European forms to simpler, rhythmic, African ones; or, less precisely, from white to black. Another aspect of the CW is this: the Beatles helped elevate raw and naive rock music to an art form, worthy of academic attention and celebration. This narrative is too simplistic, obviously, but the forces Wald traces that shaped pop music since the late-19th century are completely fascinating. I found myself reading aloud sections to loved ones and mentally reshuffling my index of musical influencers and their progeny.

Those forces are many. Wald begins with the most disruptive of all, the invention of recorded music. This led to the end of amateurism in music: fewer people learned to play instruments in the home, fewer songs circulated through sheet music, and more people began to listen to records and the radio or attend dances to learn the latest styles.

The importance of dancing is another force not often discussed. From our vantage point as recorded-music consumers, we forget that dance bands were the primary vehicles for most musicians and composers. The idea of attending a pop music concert merely to listen was an unthinkable and mostly male idea. The impact of women's tastes on what got played -- versus what got recorded -- is not often considered. Though we admire the influence of Louis Armstrong and other purveyors of hot jazz, sweet bands playing a more diluted, romantic form that was more listenable and danceable were more popular. 

Also, though the jazz players of those days were often "hot" on records and in after-hours clubs, for their paying gigs they played foxtrots, waltzes, and whatever else the dancing crowds (and dance-hall managers) desired. In this way, Paul Whiteman's style of well-arranged dance band music led the way into the big-band swing era, and his followers from Guy Lombardo through Glenn Miller remained popular until after WWII and the emergence of smaller combos playing the newest styles.

Wald shows the parallels between Whiteman and the Beatles: both took an emergent, "wild" form (jazz, rock and roll) and diluted it with other, older influences to make it more palatable to a wider audience. This is how the Beatles "destroyed" rock, by in a sense stopping its progression and infusing it with older forms and pretension of serious art. This is overstated but effective: the title certainly gets your attention.

There is much of interest I've skipped in this short sketch. Wald details several transitions that helped us to get where we are today: the rise of solo performers like Frank Sinatra; the importance of a specific recording of a song (like Chuck Berry's "Maybelline") over "standards" that could be covered by anybody; the effect of the long-playing record on listening and purchasing habits and the creation of "mood music"; the desire for more authentic rural and ethnic forms, from country and blues to calypso and Latin forms; the resurgence of dancing (and girls' tastes) in the early '60s ("How the Twist Killed Couples Dancing" could have been a good title); and the subsequent cultural segregation of white forms from black forms that continues today: while the Beatles were creating long-form art projects like "Sgt. Pepper's," Motown was making timeless pop songs under three minutes long.

It's easy to divide a century's worth of music into periods and styles, discussing the orderly transition from ragtime to jazz to swing and the "sudden" disruption by rhythm and blues, country-western, and rock 'n' roll, but the truth is a lot more continuous, cross-pollinated, and meaningful than that. I think it's all terrific, and now I gotta go find out more about the much maligned Paul Whiteman, who commissioned George Gershwin to write "Rhapsody in Blue" (the "Sgt. Pepper's" of 1924), and of whom Duke Ellington wrote, "Paul Whiteman was known as the King of Jazz, and no one as yet has come near carrying that title with more certainty and dignity."

Today's ephemera: How to Improve Your Fencing

Not much to say about this one. Excellent cover, mostly uninspired interior photo-illustrations, with a large glossary of unfamiliar terms. During the Olympics, it's one of the weirder sports to watch, in that it's almost impossible for the uninitiated to see what's happening. Or, more correctly, see what just happened, since the matches are over in a fraction of a second and scores get determined through electrically conductive bodysuits. This book is from an earlier time, when you still got to kill your opponent.

    

Today's ephemera: I'll Bet You Can't

I'll Bet You Can't: The Know How of Easy challenge Tricks: No skill - No make-ready - Every trick sure-fire

I've always liked this cover. The inside isn't so great, mostly simple bar or party gags. illustrated by the author.

I found an ad for the book in a 1947 issue of Boy's Life, and other ads in Polular Mechanics and Popular Science. It's the only book I can find from Lewis Kohrs or the Lewis Kohrs Company in Berkeley. 

Lewis Paul Kohrs was a sociology student at Cal, and I'll bet his dissertation, The social theory of Sir Matthew Hale's The primitive origination of mankind considered and examined according to the light of nature (1677), is almost certainly a classic.

 

Leonard Bernstein Omnibus

I've just finished watching a fine series on DVD I found at my library, Leonard Bernstein Omnibus. Omnibus was a cultural 1950s TV show hosted by Alistair Cooke, in his debut, and these were also Bernstein's first lectures on TV. The four DVDs have seven shows and a bonus performance of Handel's Messiah with no lecture.

Most of the episodes focus on classical music, including shows on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the music of Bach, and grand opera. I especially enjoyed the show on the art of conducting, and another on modern music. There were also episodes on American musical comedy, and an excellent one on jazz.

Leonard Bernstein is fun to watch. He became the foremost promoter of serious music on TV, and he's especially good at speaking directly to his middle-America audience: "Why are you bored by Bach? You are! Admit it! There's nothing wrong in that! It's because you don't know his music, really know it." He takes the same tack when explaining jazz or Schoenberg, that if a pleasant man took the time to explain this daffy stuff without jargon, you'd love it as much as he does. He made a perfectly lucid explanation of the development of syncopation in jazz, and of atonality in modern music. He demonstrated dissonance by playing "Star-Spangled Banner" and "America" on the piano simultaneously; for counterpoint in the Bach episode, he did it again, modifying the melodies to remove the dissonance.

Of course, he's a charismatic and handsome man, with a charmingly messy head of hair he often must brush back from his forehead -- practically a boho! I can only imagine how he appeared to his mid-'50s TV audience. We see him in rehearsals that, while staged, still must reflect something of his working style. Mostly he speaks right to the camera, using the piano or an easel with scores to demonstrate his ideas.

Recommended. I hope to see some of his Young People's Concerts, which followed these shows and lasted throughout the '60s.

Today's ephemera: Smokey Bear comic

In 1942, a Japanese plane, launched from a submarine, dropped two incendiary bombs on a forest in Oregon, which were quickly suppressed but spurred the Forest Service to start a campaign to raise awareness of forest fires. The characters from Bambi, which contains a forest fire scene, were the first, um, spokesanimals in the campaign, but Disney only released them for a year, so in 1944 a new mascot came to life: Smokey Bear. 

In 1950, a game warden in New Mexico saved a real bear cub from a fire. He was named after the cartoon mascot, and from there Smokey's fame grew. In addition to posters, stamps, dolls, radio spots, and even a pop song (called "Smokey the Bear" for musical reasons, it created confusion that still persists), Smokey was in a series of comic books. 

This tattered copy (which you can read in full here) was first published in 1960, but this reprint is from 1969. The inside back cover has a letter from Smokey to kids, but the back cover suggests "crush your smokes," so kind of a mixed message there.

Now he even has his own website where he exhorts the kids to "Get Your Smokey On."

Today's ephemera: Note for the Tooth Fairy

I've been carrying this around for almost twenty years. My son Eric wrote it the morning after he lost a tooth in the night, so he could place it under the pillow. It says:

Dar Tooth Fairy

I swolode my tooth could you give me some money!

What I've always liked is that even at that age, he was working a deal. Look, Tooth Fairy, I don't have the tooth for you. I know you usually give money when you get the tooth, but if something happened completely beyond my control, it doesn't mean I should lose the money, right? I mean, c'mon! You don't need another tooth.

Son, no one bargains with the Tooth Fairy.

On profanity

I exchanged email with my friend Bob Sutton on the subject of profanity. Bob wrote, in addition to many other valuable books on organizational behavior and management, The No Asshole Rule, a concise and necessary guide to bullying and other aggressive workplace behavior. Following Bob's blog has been educational, as he contends with people who react in various ways to the title of his book. He insisted on the title, because he felt that asshole resonated in ways that, say, jerk did not, and he has continued to defend that choice, even through the struggles of translating the word properly into other languages.

Bob recently wrote a blog post on the Strategic Use of Swearing in the Workplace, and I chimed in on the comments after someone took the old line that people who swear forfeit "the moral high ground" and make themselves look "dull-witted and stupid to have such a poor vocabulary and so little self control."

Not so! And only a certain kind of person still thinks this way, I believe. One marker might be generational -- my father, even after 20-plus years in the Navy, has never been comfortable with swearing. Another might be religious, though I think that may reflect a respect for the values of elders more than an objective consideration of why certain words are taboo. (However, Bob told me that one of his readers, a blogger and publisher of Christian books, told his readers who were offended by the title to "get over it.")

My two sons (21 and 24) grew up with a lot more profanity in the air (not from me, except strategically!). Since they were young, they've been immersed in the censorless internet, the dauntingly crude and misogynistic language of rap, exceedingly profane stand-up comedy, and violent, profanity-filled, but really well-made movies by directors like Tarantino, the Coens, and even Scorcese (The Departed had the most 'fucks' of any Oscar winner). Jon Stewart and others play TV "dirty," knowing the bleeps hardly matter to his audience -- in fact they add to the humor by keeping them naughty. Even academic books have titles like On Bullshit and The No Asshole Rule. The lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower did a whole scholarly study on The F-Word (an excellent book).

Anyway, rather than seeing this as a decline of morals, it's more like a couple generations have grown up to discover the words their parents drew lines around have only a little of the power they did even thirty years ago. It's such a small list of words, and everybody knows them; they have a venerable history. It's more like we've all woken up to see the arbitrariness of the taboo and decided to just slowly ignore it.

Well, "woken up" is wrong -- we had some help from folks like Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin: