Smile, though your heart is aching

I thought I actually learned something from watching American Idol last night, but it wasn’t the whole story.

The song Smile was performed on Idol last & it was announced that it was written by Charlie Chaplin which I was not aware of…

To be clear, the score was written by Chaplin in 1936 for his film Modern Times. He did not write the lyrics. The lyrics weren’t written until 1954 by John Turner & Geoffrey Parsons.

Since then it has covered by many artists including Barbara Streisand, Tony Bennett, Michael Jackson,  & even Robert Downey Jr.

Blow it Out Your…(04/05)

Learned a new word today:

embouchure |ämboō sh oŏr|
noun
1 Music the way in which a player applies the mouth to the mouthpiece of a brass or wind instrument.
• the mouthpiece of a flute or a similar instrument.
2 archaic the mouth of a river or valley.

ORIGIN mid 18th cent.: French, from s’emboucher ‘discharge itself by the mouth,’ from emboucher ‘put in or to the mouth,’ from em- ‘into’ + bouche ‘mouth.’

Mellow Yellow (04/03)

Do they call this Mellow Yellow?

From a 1967 article in TIME:

Current smokes include almost anything from the supermarket spice and herb shelves plus dried hydrangea leaves, chlorine-soaked lettuce, and green peppers (aged until rotten, then used as a bulbous cigarette filter). But far and away the biggest new fad is tripping on banana peels.

Delicious Legality. The kick is known to hippies as “electrical bananas” or “mellow yellow.”* Banana-heads scrape the white fibers from the inside of the peels, boil the scrapings into a paste, which is then baked. The dark brown ash that results is smoked in hand-rolled cigarette “joints” or in pipes, tastes vaguely like a burning compost heap.

Most people who have tried mellow yellow do not try it again. The reason is simple: lots of work for little, if any, high. But banana-heads find the craze appealing, largely because of its delicious legality.

But do bananas really work? The best that chemists can suggest is that bananas contain serotonin, a neurochemical that is closely related to such potent mind-benders as psilocybin and dimethyl tryptamine, and which just might, under combustion, trigger genuine physiological effects. It is far more likely that any high produced by bananas is imaginary, another indication that, given a receptive state of mind, it is possible to turn on with practically anything—or virtually nothing.

^{* From British Folk-Rock Singer Donovan’s Mellow Yellow: “Electrical banana is gonna be a sudden craze. Electrical banana is bound to be the very next phase. They call it mellow yellow (quite rightly) . . .” Donovan insists that his song has no hidden meaning, but seekers found one anyway.}

read entire article here.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered (03/28)

What is a One Penny Black?

Even though my brother got this answer wrong while playing trivia, he shared the correct answer with me.

It was the first stamp!

Unfortunately, for my brother and his team the answer was not black licorice.

Earworms (03/25)

No, I am not talking about the horrible scene in Star Trek: Wrath of Kahn. If you don’t know the scene I am talking about, consider yourself lucky.

I am talking about the term used to describe when you get a song stuck in your head.

Many people are set off by the theme music of a film or television show or advertisement. This is not coincidental, for such music is designed, in the terms of the music industry, to “hook” the listener, to be “catchy or “sticky” – to bore its, like an earwig, into the ear or mind; hence the term “earworms” -though one might be inclined to call them “brainworms” instead.

from Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia, p 45

Now the next time you get a song stuck in your head you can imagine it as a worm. You can thank me later.

Like Father, Like Son (03/24)

Joakim Noah, of the Chicago Bulls, is not the only athlete in the family.

His father, Yannick Noah, was a professional tennis player and won the French Open in 1983.

I am not sure if Joakim has the same musical aspirations, but Yannick is also a pop-soul singer. Who says you have  to the same thing your entire life?

A Musician’s Brain (03/20)

In Part II, chapter 7 of Oliver Sacks book, Musicophilia he states that:

Anatomists today would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer, or a mathematician–but they could recognize the brain of a professional musician without a moment’s hesitation.

p.100

You may be asking yourself how on earth is that possible?

Using MRI morphometry, Gottfried Schlaug at Harvard and his colleagues made careful compariaons of the sizes of various prain structures. In 1995, they published a paper showing that the corpus callosum, the commissure that connects the two hemispheres of the brain, is enlarged in professional musicians and the auditory cortex has an asymetric enlargement in musicians with absolute pitch.  Schlaug et al. went on to show increased volumes in gray matter in motor, auditory, and visuospatial areas of the cortex as well as the cerebellem.

Django Reinhardt (03/19)

I first heard of the musician Django Reinhart when I saw Woody Allen’s film Sweet and Lowdown. As you may recall, Sean Penn’s character Emmet Ray idolizes Django and if I recall correctly, passes out when he sees Django at a gas station.

Shortly after seeing the movie, I began listening to some of Reinhardt’s guitar solos. The music he makes is amazing and after you read what happened to him in 1928, you’ll be even more amazed.

On November 2nd, 1928 an event took place that would forever change Django’s life. At one o’clock in the morning the 18 year old Django returned from a night of playing music at a new club “La Java” to the caravan that was now the home of himself and his new wife. The caravan was filled with celluloid flowers his wife had made to sell at the market on the following day. Django upon hearing what he thought was a mouse among the flowers bent down with a candle to look. The wick from the candle fell into the highly flammable celluloid flowers and the caravan was almost instantly transformed into a raging inferno. Django wrapped himself in a blanket to shield him from the flames. Somehow he and his wife made it across the blazing room to safety outside, but his left hand, and his right side from knee to waist were badly burned.

Initially doctors wanted to amputate his leg but Django refused. He was moved to a nursing home where the care was so good his leg was saved. Django was bedridden for eighteen months. During this time he was given a guitar, and with great determination Django created a whole new fingering system built around the two fingers on his left hand that had full mobility. His fourth and fifth digits of the left hand were permanently curled towards the palm due to the tendons shrinking from the heat of the fire. He could use them on the first two strings of the guitar for chords and octaves but complete extension of these fingers was impossible. His soloing was all done with the index and middle fingers! Film clips of Django show his technique to be graceful and precise, almost defying belief.

Blue Eyes and Boots (03/11)

Frank Sinatra and his daughter Nancy’s duet “Somethin’ Stupid”  remains to be the only father-daughter duet to hit No. 1 in the United States. (It hit #1 in the U.S. and the UK in April 1967 and spent nine weeks at the top of Billboard’s easy listening chart)

Frank & Nacy Sinatra 1966

This was despite the fact that DJs in 1967 referred to the duet and the “incest song”

With these lyrics, It’s not hard to imagine why they might say that:

I know I stand in line until you think
You have the time to spend an evening with me
And if we go someplace to dance
I know that there’s a chance you won’t be leaving with me
And afterwards we drop into a quiet little place
And have a drink or two……
And then I go and spoil it all by saying
Something stupid like I love you

I can see it in your eyes that you despise
The same old lines you heard the night before……
And though it’s just a line to you for me it’s true……
And never seemed so right before
I practice everyday to find some clever lines
To say to make the meaning come true……
But then I think I’ll wait until the evening gets late
And I’m alone with you
The time is right your perfume fills my head……
The stars get red and on the nights so blue……
And then I go and spoil it all by saying
Something stupid like I love you

….

Did You Realize? (03/09)

At work we have a large sized wipe on which different questions appear on a fairly regular basis.

Today’s topic: Happiest Song You Know…

My answer was: “Do You Realize” by the Flaming Lips

That is when a co-worker of mine informed that “Do You Realize” had been made the official state rock song of Oklahoma. (apparently they picked a state song from each musical genre)

What a lovely tribute from the band’s home state.

read the story here.