Fitzgerald: Interludes #17-59

http://infidelnation.org/tomtom.WAV
Genius Of Love by The Tom Tom Club
*~@):~{>

Is it just me, or do other people also find the music in most fast food places, gyms, restaurants, etc, totally obnoxious? I'm not a big fan of Italian food, but at least Olive Garden plays songs by Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra, which is a major reason I eat there.
Hugh should open his own restaurant chain: "Hugh's Haram Palace", where the music is mellow and the food is hot.

Hugh should open his own restaurant chain: "Hugh's Haram Palace", where the music is mellow and the food is hot.

A wonderful idea!
I would work without wages in "Hugh's Haram Palace". Well, I assume I will get free food. AND free music!

For a cinematic moment, try the Nicholas Brothers with Cab Calloway from the movie, "Stormy Weather." Fred Astaire called this the greatest dance number ever filmed.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=zBb9hTyLjfM

This is a rare song from the Great Era of Afro-Cuban music of the 1930s

Bruca Manigua song by Miguelito Valdes
http://www.imeem.com/tag/bruca

This is an African slaves plaint, who says he cannot live without freedom.

history of the song
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=460986

"Angelitos Negros" - sung by Eartha Kitt -composer Andres Eloy Blanco

http://flickr.com/photos/beija-flor/545254269/

go to the middle of the page

Thanks, Hugh. You brightened my day, and now I'll have something to recommend to my husband that is lighthearted... Maybe he'll be less worried about my turning into an obsessed psycho.

Suggestions put up here are unlikely to receive favorable consideration. At this point, after so many implorings, they will only be considered if included in an email. The thread here is not for suggestions, still less for the lyrics accompanying those suggested songs (as in an about-to-be-deleted posting just above), but only for comments, should there be any, on the Interludes already put up.

Truthfully, I've think you been pick and choosing all kinds of music just because they are of the 20s and 30s. You're the only can that can find them. Very few have the fine taste of Hugh Fitzgerald

Ok, where are the other people contributing? Between my inclusions, where are the other people rushing to add?

You know, why don't you just delete all of mine? SO?

I explained that I would be choosing music that was insufficiently known, either because it comes from another time, or another place. I also wrote, repeatedly, that suggestions should be made in emails, sent to Robert and then forwarded to me. Why should that perfectly reasonable request, repeated repeatedly, leave you indignant? Just use email. What could be clearer?

"open his own restaurant chain..."
-- from a posting above

Existing restaurants should simply start using the Interludes. Business will boom. Many more customers, and many more ordering dessert and coffee in order to hear another song or two.

And then the big stores -- Costco, Home Depot, and so on -- should follow suit. No one will ever want to leave, and they will keep going up and down those aisles, loading their carts.

If you own a cafe, a restaurant, a store, or a mega-store chain, then you should start using this carefully-selected music (the imagined CD is just around the corner) -- and your sales, thanks to this potent music, will cause more people to give you their business. And you are encouraged then, as those sales skyrocket, as those customers keep flocking in without quite knowing why, to do the handsome thing, and to calculate gratefully the extra amount you are taking in attributable to that music, and then to make out a check for some percentage of that, and to mail it, c/o Robert Spencer, mywards. For services rendered as your business's musical consultant. Or your personal musical consultant. Or something. Really, I have to make a living and the whole touchy subject isn't quite as funny as everyone seems to think it is. Or perhaps, if you are not I, it is.

Hugh you ever heard of Rock and Roll brother? ...Ha Ha Ha

I'm not talking Elvis either. ; )

"Rock and Roll..."
-- from a posting above

Music of the 1950s will be posted, as lip-synched by actors, in various Dennis Potter made-for-television films.

Abdul Abulbul Amir
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6Tv5AUybNw

The song about Abdul Abulbul Amir, and his fight with Ivan Skavinsky Skavar -- I remember reading the lyrics in Sigmund Spaeth's excellent "Read 'Em And Weep" -- would be a good one. However, the recording to which you give a link is impossible to listen to, because the wrong phonograph -- not orthophonic -- has been used. Squeeks and squawks horribly. I won't inflict that on anyone. If another version is put up, or the right player used, I will.

Here's the version I would put up, from the Old Sod, and with the lyrics alongside:

http://www.contemplator.com/ireland/abdul.html

Thank-you for the link to Teddy Bears' Picnic.

Many, many years ago as a young child in Morocco - in the High Atlas - and a child of an itinerant chartered civil engineer my only contact with home was a cracked 10inch 78rpm recording of this song on the flip side of which was a recording of Hush, hush here comes the bogeyman.

I still have that ancient shellac in my possession but alas I do not have the equipment to play it on. To hear it again brought tears to my eyes.

My partner, ex-RAF, remembers the same song from his days as a child of an RAF Officer in Singapore just after WWII. Together we cried and laughed and remembered the very different world that we grew up in. Thank-you.

Thank-you for the link, Hugh Fitzgerald. For us the last verse was always as follows -

And Europe's sole maiden her lone vigil keeps,
Neath the light of our cold northern star,
And the verse that she murmurs in vain as she weeps,
is Freedom and Liberty's Bar.

Libertys Bar is a great Nottingham watering hole and nightclub famed throughout England as a place of jollity and licence - of the most refined sort, of course.

Thank you.

More by Henry Hall, Ray Noble, Jack Hylton, Lew Stone, Roy Fox, Jack Payne, and many other orchestras, and vocalists including Al Bowlly, Jack Buchanan, Sam Browne, Jessie Matthews (see #1), Anona Winn, Gertrude Lawrence, Elsie Randolph are all coming up, according to a premeditated but not inflexible schedule, as the English choices.

Take a look at Lily Morris singing -- #17 -- "My Old Man Said Follow The Van." And Charles Coborn doing "The Man Who Broke the Bank At Monte Carlo.". There's more in that music-hall vein, as well, almost an illustration of The World We Have Lost, but of course a world we are free to regain, at least in pertinent part, at any time, by insisting on it.

Now, for that ex-RAF man:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iJaOvPIFKA

Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you, Hugh Fitzgerald.

Your last link has reduced two old codgers to nostalgic, quivering heaps who will be your slaves forever for finding these links - well, maybe not quite slaves(!) but certainly forever gratefull.

Of course we can recover this world - remake it if necessary. As a riminder of what we could lose this is an inestimably valuable thread.

Please keep on serving up the interludes.

Wild palominos couldn't stop me.

Good! Don't stop. But we are sure that you could tame the wild palominos using Epona's song - somewhat apt considering that you are providing Links.

Forgive the bad pun, please - but no seven year slumber, for heaven's sake.

Hmmm! I hope our last post wasn't a Trigger for inaction!

Perhaps we should have replied simply: "Ah, sherry" and left all else hanging.

Ah Django Reinhardt...

After all these years I still remember the hit of the magic of "Nuages". And the first package of "Gauloise". Gosh, to be a smoker again...

Dare we after "Tears" hope for Nuages?..."Hungaria"?..."Parfum"?..."I'll see you in my dreams"? All with Django.

Please, please, surprise us!

Thank you Hugh.

Of course I'll surprise you.

No seven year slumber, no seven year itch, not even any seven league boots.

But, certainly, seventh heaven.

Yes, seventh heaven. But also engendered by following Hugh's links is a sense of superbia (pride), the seventh of the cardinal sins, and humility, the seventh of the Holy virtues, in the face of such art.

OliverPCamford,

Are you sure about that bit about pride?

I looked into the Catholic Encyclopaedia (where else?) where pride is given the top rank among mortal sins. I am quoting the opening paragraph from the entry:

“Pride is the excessive love of one's own excellence. It is ordinarily accounted one of the seven capital sins. St. Thomas, however, endorsing the appreciation of St. Gregory, considers it the queen of all vices, and puts vainglory in its place as one of the deadly sins. In giving it this pre-eminence he takes it in a most formal and complete signification. He understands it to be that frame of mind in which a man, through the love of his own worth, aims to withdraw himself from subjection to Almighty God, and sets at naught the commands of superiors. It is a species of contempt of God and of those who bear his commission. Regarded in this way, it is of course mortal sin of a most heinous sort.”

The Encyclopaedia carries on listing and explaining assorted kind of pride, but I am too humble to claim I understand all of it. (Sometimes I am quite proud of my humility).
Nevertheless, I am positive that none of the subdivisions of pride corresponds even remotely to the reflection I and, I am sure, you too have while listening to these most delightful, lovely, graceful pieces of evidence of our civilization’s humaneness unsurpassed by anything preceding, or contemporary with it.
So yes, I am, in a sense, proud of it but not as much I feel fortunate and endlessly grateful for being born into the family of the West thus able to connect with and love gems like “interludes”, on a level completely inaccessible to the less fortunate born in other cultures. I guess many of these poor devils may even enjoy things like interludes, but they can never identify with the spirit that made them possible.
Ha!!!
Oops, I think the “Ha” exclamation could indicate I have just plunged into the sin of pride.
Hmmm, …pride…feels gooood…

You have mentioned RAF before and then there was an interlude with Vera Lynn and the RAF men joining her in “We’ll meet again”, which made me remember a summer some 25 years ago when I was helping an ex WWII RAF Polish pilot to fix his ketch. One could write a book about that wonderful, wise, gentle and modest man. His escape at age 19 from Nazi occupied Poland, across Europe at tremendous risk to France and, finally over the Channel to join the British at the time of the Blitz - is alone worth a film. He flew a record number of bombing sorties as a pilot and was lucky to make it alive through the war. Once he heard me whistling while painting the mast “We’ll meet again” and said, paraphrasing and imitating Churchill, “ah, Vera Lynn, if not for her God knows how the war would have ended.”
I’ll never forget that man.

The technological marvel that is YouTube, which can then allow such a display as that being put out at "Interludes," Oliver P. Camford suggests, can lead at first to a sense of superbia -- pride in what has been achieved in, by, for the Western world.

Or, gnomically put:

Circuitry Leads To Surquidry.

I had no difficulty understanding, if not entirely agreeing, with Oliver’s witty reflection.
But the gnome sent me rummaging around the Webster for “surquidry”. It was worth it. Brilliant!

I hope I can remember the word tomorrow, so I may try to impress my English lady-friend. Hope she doesn’t know it, so I may relish a few moments of supreme surquidry while explaining it to her.
Hmmm,...surquidry...

To whom, exactly, are you referring when you write "the gnome sent me rummaging"?

thomas. h: The wit, such as it was, was all. My Catholic Dictionary (RKP, London, 1951) happens to list the Cardinal Sins so that Pride is the seventh of such.

By the way, Hugh, Edmund Spencer spells it surquedry - if memory serves me aright - as does Ben Jonson:

"No, vizarded impudence. I am neither player nor masquer: but the god himself, whose deity is here profaned by thee. Thou, and thy like think yourselves authorized in this place to all license of surquedry. But you shall find custom hath not so grafted you here, but you may be rent up, and thrown out as unprofitable evils. I tell thee, I will have no more masquing; I will not buy a false and fleeting delight so dear: the merry madness of one hour shall not cost me the repentance of an age."

But then, modern spellings for a modern and debased age, and certainly I am no good fellow.

Oh, Puck it! I spelled 'authorised' with a 'z' instead of the English 's'. I'm off to put out some milk. Is that distant laughter I hear? Dash it, my candle's gone out!

Hugh Fitzgerald: Gnome - A small, stocky, subterranean person who guards buried treasure (Dictionary of English Folklore, OUP, 1961). I'd take it as a compliment if I were you - and apposite too, given your work on the Interludes!

homas h: I too have memories of a brave Polish soldier. His name was Jan Bielecki - eventually a Colonel in the British Army and, I understand, a Commando. Upon the outbreak of WWII he fled from the Ecole Militaire in Paris and joined the Free Polish in the UK as a private soldier. He fought for us and our freedom and in training for the fight met and married a wonderful golach (from Caithness) lassie - a relative of mine - and after the war he settled in the village of Lairg in Sutherland (the land of the Cattachs). I am proud to call him 'uncle' even though he passed away some fourteen years ago. He never went home and he became a naturalised British citizen (such a compliment) but he lived long enough to see his home country emerge from the Communist tyranny.

More than that, he lived long enough to find - thanks to the government of modern Israel - his son by his first marriage: a son from whom he had been separated by the Nazis and their stupid ethnic cleansing policies directed against the Slavs and the Jews. I wasn't present on that day in Copenhagen but the memory of the telling of it still reduces me to tears.

So, here's to all the brave men and women who have fought to keep us free and especially the Poles, "The First to Fight".

Hugh,
My faithful battered “Random House Dictionary” lists two kind of gnomes.
The first corresponds to the definition quoted by OliverPCamford while the second is defined as a “Short pithy expression of a general truth: aphorism”.
It is the last one that “sent me rummaging”.

I am of average American height -- not as tall as the Dutch, not as short as the Japanese, and not stocky (otherwise what good is all this hamster-like treadmilling?).

And my existence is not "subterranean" and like all sensible people I hope to delay that inevitable day. Above ground, I am of course living the life of Riley, or rather, not Riley as in One-Eyed Riley but Sidney Reilly, about whom you can find out more in Bruce Lockhart's biography, should you care to find out more.

You mention Spenser's spelling of "surquidry" as "surquedry" and impliedly wonder what is up. I used the varient spelling "surquidry" for three reasons: 1) it is more common today and 2) it looks and sounds better than "surquedry" and 3)it better indicates its own origins, for the "quid" summons up more immediately the French origianl. Think of the French word "outre-cuidance." Think Anglo-Norman.

However, since you mentioned Spenser, I decided to put into the second sentence of the second paragraph of this posting, I offered an example of "a very pretty epanorthosis" (see if you can find it) that is a tribute to Colin Clout, and A Shepheard's Calendar, and the man who created both of them, Edmund Spenser, of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and the English plantations in Ireland, and great housese, and also, for all time, a place in every survey course in English literature (or so I once assumed) -- why, there must be at least five, or possibly six such courses still being given around the world, courses in which the students are introduced to more than a half-dozen pages of him, usually consisting of an extract from "The Faerie Queene" possibly the Dedication and a few stanzas -- Spenserian stanzas, mind you -- from Book I and possibly even a bit of the Mutabilitie Canto. I suspect that of those half-dozen courses that do offer a sufficient amount of Spenser, at least three of them are given in Russia, with at least one more in China, or possibly Japan.

OliverPCamford,

What a exceptional and moving story you are telling! Well, these terrible years abound in exceptional and moving stories. Unfortunately, not all ended as lucky as they did for your uncle, or the Polish RAF pilot, or my own late father - a combat officer in the Polish Army fighting alongside the Soviet Army in the Eastern front.

You also mention the meeting between father and son in in Copenhagen - of all places. I have been living in Copenhagen for many years now and I think I have heard the story mentioned somewhere , either in the media, or by some of my Polish friends. Perhaps some of them remembers it. I will try to find out.

So, here's to all the brave men and women who have fought to keep us free and especially the Poles, "The First to Fight".

And here is to all the brave men and women of Great Britain who fought First and Singly and against all odds enduring alone the German fury until the rest of the allies were ready to join in.
So many toasts, so little time…

Hugh,

Just to keep out even slightest unambiguity:
Circuitry Leads To Surquidry.

This is the gnome that sent me rummaging.

It, of course, should be "ambiguity" - not "unambiguity".
What is happening to me?

It seems, Hugh, no, it is, a very modern example of epanorthosis but, alas, no paronomasia (my own favoured linguistic foolery).

Of course, these are mere inkhorn terms and I feel sure that dear old Thomas (Wilson - Art of Rhetoric, that is) is spinning in his grave as we bandy such terms between us - classifying us both as mere Lincolnshire gentlemen as he does so!

It is excessively presumptious - a demonstration of my own outrecuidance - of me to indicate my agreement with you over the spelling of surquidry (surquedry) but it seems that I must do so - I must think as I am, Anglo-Norman.

I will end as I began - with many thanks for the Interludes and an exhortation to keep on with them (with, or, one hopes, without, the 'wild palominos' - such a wonderful image; a wild, untamed grape wreaking its havoc, no doubt, amongst and within the bodegas of Jerez and efectuating a civilising trend amongst those who freely imbibe of its spirit).

thomas h: "So many toasts, so little time...".

There is always time, dear fellow, to raise a glass for all those who fight, who have fought, for freedom. When next you hoist a foaming tankard to your lips, in Bemelmans or in some seedy dive on Zhongshan Road or in The Inside Story in the Cafe Mondegar on Colaba Causeway or in the Cawdor Tavern in the Highlands remember them. And quietly, to yourself, or publicly within your company assembled, offer the toast that honours all of them (and us) - 'To Freedom'; softly spoken or cried aloud it is the greatest toast!

And remember, as you do so, our turn to defend these hard won liberties of ours will surely come. Pray God that we will be as true as they were in this great defence and as you raise your glass to them raise it to your future self also.

To freedom: may we never be found wanting in its defence!

Thomas Wilson?

Don't know him. Puttenham and Peacham are the only boys for me.

Hugh Fitzgerald: I hope that you are not following a "lewd and illicit career" on this site by following the precepts in The Arte of English Poesie, but, rather, cultivating the fruits of your intellect in the 'Garden of Eloquence' with a view to becoming 'The Compleat Gentleman!'

Thomas Wilson (1524-1581) in The Art of Rhetoric (which was divided into two books), said this upon the Five Divisions of Rhetoric -

"Five Things to be Considered in an Orator:
Any one that will largely handle any matter, must fasten his mind first of all, upon these five especial points that follow, and learn them every one.
Invention of matter.
Disposition of the same.
Elocution.
Memory
Utterance.
The finding out of apt matter, called otherwise invention, is a searching out of things true, or things likely, the which may reasonably set forth a matter and make it appear probable. The places of logic give good occasion to find out plentiful matter. And therefore, they that will prove any cause, and seek only to teach thereby the truth, must search out the places of logic, and no doubt they shall find much plenty."

Seems to me that the purpose of this site is aptly summed up therein.

Puttenham and Peacham indeed. Mere amateurs compared to Wilson. But you engendered much pleasure and much laughter in mentioning them - and that, surely, is one of the purposes of an Interlude, is it not?

I like the figures. Figures of grammar, figures of sound. I like to have lists of them, definitions of them, examples of them, preferably found in Shakespeare, possibly by Sister Miriam Joseph. I like to memorize those lists. For that, Puttenham is the most useful. He wins the palm, the oak, the bays. I forget why I like Peacham. It's been a long time. But Schoenbaum's Scolar Press in England, several decades ago, was systemiatically putting out good reprints of this stuff. I bought two copies of Puttenham, one of the Earl of Roscommon on Translation, and I forget what else, but it didn't include the Peacham whose book made a deep impression on me in some course I took, back when the West was won.

Though Thomas Wilson, as quoted, sounds like Cicero or Quintilian de--eloquentia stuff (it's all Greek to me), on your recommendation I'll take a look wnhen I can. All of these are figures now relegated to a volume of Shakespeare Survey, or a review in the TLS, and no longer to be found on syllabi. In the university I attended, a knowledge of Shakespeare -- back and forth, up and down, every-which-way, was once required of all those wishing to graduate with a degree in English. Not now. Not 37 plays, not 20, not ten, not one -- what need one? -- is now required. Make of that what you will. Or Twelfth Night. Whatever.

To freedom: may we never be found wanting in its defence!

Amen.