Take This Tune - Done With Bonaparte

I haven't done a "Take This Tune" since moving it over to my main blog. The rules are simple and are on the right. Just sign in below to let everyone know if you have had an idea sparked by the lyrics to the above song by Mark Knopfler which is both a history lesson and the suffering of all soldiers asked to serve for their country. May all the men and women currently fighting around the world, come home safe to their families.

DONE WITH BONAPARTE
Mark Knopfler

We've paid in hell since Moscow burned
As Cossacks tear us piece by piece
Our dead are strewn a hundred leagues
Though death would be a sweet release
And our grande arm?e is dressed in rags
A frozen starving beggar band
Like rats we steal each other's scraps
Fall to fighting hand to hand

Save my soul from evil, Lord
And heal this soldier's heart
I'll trust in thee to keep me, Lord
I'm done with Bonaparte

What dreams he made for us to dream
Spanish skies, Egyptian sands
The world was ours, we marched upon
Our little Corporal's command
And I lost an eye at Austerlitz
The sabre slash yet gives me pain
My one true love awaits me still
The flower of the aquitaine

Save my soul from evil, Lord
And heal this soldier's heart
I'll trust in thee to keep me, Lord
I'm done with Bonaparte

I pray for her who prays for me
A safe return to my belle France
We prayed these wars would end all wars
In war we know is no romance
And I pray our child will never see
A little Corporal again
Point toward a foreign shore
Captivate the hearts of men

Save my soul from evil, Lord
And heal this soldier's heart
I'll trust in thee to keep me, Lord
I'm done with Bonaparte

Take This Tune Red Dirt Girl

This is a beautiful but terribly sad song about two girls with dreams.  One made hers come true.  The other completely lost her way.  Your challenge is to Take This Tune and tell us about choices and outcomes.

Important Notice: The "Take This Tune" meme will be moving here to  Durward Discussion from it's former site.  The rules are simple.  Listen to the music and then take the tune as a theme for your own site.  You can write anything or use photography or answer with another musical selection at any time during the week following.  It is wide open just a prompt for anything you want to do.  Then be sure to link back here and sign the linky so others can see what you have to share on your blog.  Feel Free to use the Take This Tune Logo above.



RED DIRT GIRL

Me and my best friend Lillian
And her blue tick hound dog Gideon,
Sittin on the front porch cooling in the shade
Singin every song the radio played
Waitin for the Alabama sun to go down
Two red dirt girls in a red dirt town
Me and Lillian
Just across the line and a little southeast of Meridian.

She loved her brother I remember back when
He was fixin up a '49 Indian
He told her 'Little sister, gonna ride the wind
Up around the moon and back again"
He never got farther than Vietnam,
I was standin there with her when the telegram come
For Lillian.
Now he's lyin somewhere about a million miles from Meridian.

She said there's not much hope for a red dirt girl
Somewhere out there is a great big world
Thats where I'm bound
And the stars might fall on Alabama
But one of these days I'm gonna swing
My hammer down
Away from this red dirt town
I'm gonna make a joyful sound

She grew up tall and she grew up thin
Buried that old dog Gideon
By a crepe myrtle bush in the back of the yard,
Her daddy turned mean and her mama leaned hard
Got in trouble with a boy from town
Figured that she might as well settle down
So she dug right in
Across a red dirt line just a little south east from Meridian

She tried hard to love him but it never did take
It was just another way for the heart to break
So she dug right in.
But one thing they don't tell you about the blues
When you got em
You keep on falling cause there ain't no bottom
There ain't know end.
At least not for Lillian

Nobody knows when she started her skid,
She was only 27 and she had five kids.
Coulda' been the whiskey,
Coulda been the pills,
Coulda been the dream she was trying to kill.
But there won't be a mention in the news of the world
About the life and the death of a red dirt girl
Names Lillian
Who never got any farther across the line than Meridian.

Now the stars still fall on Alabama
Tonight she finally laid
That hammer down
Without a sound
In the red dirt ground

Take This Tune - Getting What You Need

Take This Tune provides a musical prompt each week, usually a video with the song lyrics.  The task is to write something inspired by the song or something in the lyrics.  Click on the link to join in on the fun.  Be sure to drop in on Travis of Trav's Thoughts as he always has something interesting to say about each week's music.


This week there is a choice of two songs, both from the soundtrack of the motion picture "The Big Chill":  Ain't Too Proud to Beg from The Temptations and You Can't Always Get What You Want from The Rolling Stones.


I've given a lot of thought lately to getting what you want vs. what you need.  It often seems that there is a great deal of injustice in the world.  One person will be blessed with looks, intelligence, talent, connections, and wealth while another will be dumped into an existence where they are lucky to survive to adulthood and condemned to a subsistent way of life amid turmoil and danger.  Even though this is true, there are times when the almost royally blessed will destroy themselves while someone who seemingly has nothing will rise to tower over those who live average lives, but those are the extremes of both conditions.


For most of us it is a matter of choices and opportunities.  When you look back you can see the forks in the road where you went left or right or, for that matter, just didn't choose which is a kind of choice and let life and those around you make you body surf on the swell of the waves of the selections made by others.  Some of those events led to great sorrow, but eventually brought the gift of a great happiness that wouldn't have happened if you hadn't been sent down that road in the first place.  Then there are the times when a totally unexpected opportunity will present itself - a "free for nothing" chance that almost makes you gasp at your good fortune. 


Much of our lives seem governed by fate and it is only in looking back that you can see that life itself is the "What You Need" and the best that most of us can do is to give someone else an opportunity whenever we can so that maybe, just maybe what goes around will come around again.  Don't ever be jealous of those who seem to have more because you never know what is happening in the lives of all those we see and meet.

Richard Cory Whenever Richard Cory went down town, We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown, Clean-favoured and imperially slim. And he was always quietly arrayed, And he was always human when he talked; But still he fluttered pulses when he said, "Good Morning!" and he glittered when he walked. And he was rich, yes, richer than a king, And admirably schooled in every grace: In fine -- we thought that he was everything To make us wish that we were in his place. So on we worked and waited for the light, And went without the meat and cursed the bread, And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, Went home and put a bullet in his head. Edwin Arlington Robinson

The House That Built Me

Today's Take This Tune is The House That Built Me with its lyrics of unfixed loss.  In my case, the house fixed something that might have been broken.

There it is 9019 Earhart in Westchester, CA. It was a tiny house that is now erased and buried somewhere under the tarmac of the new Los Angeles International Airport. It is a measure of how long ago that I lived there, that what everyone assumes is LAX is not the first airport of my memories. That first one now called Mines Field had a chain link fence and people would park beside it for the excitement of watching the Lockheed Constellation land. There was nothing quite like that huge plane with its thundering engines coming in just a few feet over your head as the whole car shook with the vibration.

All of the streets around us had the names associated with the flight pioneers such as Bleriot, Wright, and Croydon for good reason. In addition to the airport, all the men were aircraft engineers at companies such as Hughes or Air Research. My Uncle Don was one of them. The lady in the picture is my Aunt Ruth. They were the people who took in this helicopter child every time a home was needed, first on Earhart and then later on 78th where it intersected with Croydon. If they couldn't do it then the slack was picked up by Aunt Helen or Aunt Eva, but most of the time this was the place I thought of as "home" even when temporarily lodged with one or the other of my semi delinquent parents.



At the age of the me in the picture above, my favorite song was Bing Crosby's, "Far Away Places".  To this day, I think that the sound of all those planes coming and going were what made a gypsy existence bearable. You see all the planes left and then they came back. They saw wonderful places all over the world and then returned to safety. Somehow this idea of the open skies built in a love for the freedom of the next destination, because you could always come home. As with this week's song, I could knock on the door of that 78th street home, but I can see from Google street view that it has been expanded and of course other people live their now. But I'm glad it is still there and that someday I might once more fly into the new LAX and just drive by before heading off one more time singing my theme song now, "Anyplace I Hang My Hat Is Home".

Take This Tune - The Likes of Gilbert Roland

This week's Take This Tune is Guy Clark's "South Coast of Texas" with its story of the many cultures of South Texas from the French Creole, Mexican, and Texan hard working families that ring the gulf of Mexico now giving way to the gentrification of tourists but still hanging on to a proud way of life that requires the "dignity of whooping cranes and the likes of Gilbert Roland".  This set me off on one of my "follow that link" manias and this time lucky people, you get to tag along.  If you have a story of your own, please join in by clicking on the Take This Tune link above.

The first time I heard "The South Coast of Texas", my first thought was that I knew exactly what the words "the likes of Gilbert Roland" meant, but the second was "does anyone still remember Gilbert Roland".  My memory immediately took me to the movie "Beneath the 12 Mile Reef" where he played a Greek deep sea sponge diver.  It was only the 3rd movie made in Cinemascope so the underwater scenes on the huge screen made up for any weaknesses in the script loosely based on Romeo and Juliet.


Gilbert Roland (Luis Antonio Dámaso de Alonso - December 11, 1905 – May 15, 1994) was one of the great Mexican leading men.  Though often cast as just about every swarthy ethnicity imaginable, he was one of the forces to gain both roles and respect for Mexican actors even while logging in time in roles often filled with cliches such as the Cisco Kid and Zorro.  His career spanned  from the silent era through to the early 1980s.  The coming of sound had not ended it, he had played in all kinds of movies, he had held the most beautiful women in his arms, and maybe the most important thing, he had been given the opportunity to show his acting talents.

Gilbert Roland and Ricardo Montalban among others were the spearheads that have made it possible for actors who followed them to play roles that were not caricatures of Mexicans but to give them a reality and dignity without prejudice.


Ricardo Montalban  ( November 25, 1920 – January 14, 2009).

Despite their campaigns on behalf of Mexican actors, both Roland and Montalban made one of their last major motion pictures together as Native Americans in John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn, a true story of the 1878 campaign of chiefs Little Wolf  (Ricardo Montalban) and Dull Knife (Gilbert Roland) who lead over three hundred starved and weary Cheyenne from their reservation in the Oklahoma territory to their home in Wyoming.  During the journey, they managed to elude the U.S. cavalry units which were trying to capture them. The two groups split up after reaching Nebraska, and while Dull Knife's party was eventually forced to surrender near Fort Robinson, Little Wolf's group made their way to Montana where there were finally allowed to remain.


This confluence of Mexican Actors striving for acceptance playing American Indians in a John Ford movie about driving tribes to the reservation.  Just to top it off the Indians may or may not have been speaking Navajo instead of Cheyenne per a story told in Tony Hillerman's Sacred Clowns.


Tony Hillerman - Sacred Clowns - Jim Chee, a Navajo tribal policeman, and his girlfriend Janet Pete (half Navajo, half white) take a Cheyenne law enforcement officer to see the movie at a drive-in on the Navajo reservation. They explain why the Navajo audience enjoys the film so much and finds it so hilarious by revealing to him that much of the supposedly "Cheyenne"-language dialog is actually in Navajo, and actually says things, mostly ribald or obscene, that have nothing to do with the scene supposedly being played in the movie.  So if you happen to know anyone who speaks Navaho, invite them over for a movie night and get them to explain the jokes.


As we are all well aware, the Gulf of Mexico has taken quite a beating in the past few years from Katrina to the BP oil spill.  It would seem that the damage may take decades to repair and in the meantime, the recovery of the fishing and the way of life for "Shrimpers and their ladies" may never be the same.  You might want to make the trip to "The Coast of Campeche" while something of its magic still remains.

Take This Tune - Big City Blues

This week's Take this tune is from the 2:00 AM Paradise Cafe album and is sung by Mel Torme and Barry Manilow.  It is the classic expression of the jaded urbanite down in the depths over lost, missing or never arrived love.  It is one of those jazzy blues tunes that actually makes you happy rather than depressed.  From that standpoint, I can never hear it without thinking of the self deluding gentleman in the poem below from The Last Unicorn and Tommy Steel's cheerful if promiscuous leprechaun of Finnian's Rainbow singing When I'm Not Near The Girl I Love (Unfortunately no embedding, but watch it anyway).

Many people need the thrill of falling love and when the endorphins start to die down they think they need to go find someone new to get a new thrill rather than allowing time for it to grow into something deeper.  It may be the stuff of good music, good paintings, or good novels.  It is rarely the stuff of a truly happy life.


Way I Behaved
Peter Beagle

When I was a young man, and very well thought of
There was nought I could ask that the ladies denied.
I nibbled their hearts like a handful of raisins,
And I never spoke love, but I knew that I lied.
     But I said to myself, "Ah, there's none of them knows
     The secret I shelter, and savor, and save.
     I wait for the one who can see through my seeming
     And I'll know when I love by the way I behave".

The years they passed over like clouds in the heavens,
The ladies went by me like snow on the wind.
I charmed and I cheated, deceived and dissembled
And I sinned, and I sinned and I sinned and I sinned.
     But I said to myself,"Ah, there's none of them knows
     There's a part of me pure as the whisk of a wave.
     My love may be late, but she'll find I have been faithful
     And I'll know when I love by the way I behave".

At last came a lady, both knowing and tender
Who said "You are not at all what they take you to be".
I betrayed her before she had quite finished speaking,
And she swallowed cold poison, and jumped in the sea.
     And I say to myself, when there's time for a word,
     As I gracefully grow more debauched and depraved.
     "Ah, love may be strong, but a habit is stronger
     And I know how I loved by the way I behaved"

Take This Tune - The Best Part of the Day

This week's Take This Tune is "The Best Part of the Day" from the new "The Union" album by Elton John and Leon Russell.  I decided to grab one line out of the lyrics because it reminded me of an "Our Song" that to this day can make me cry.

You're my best friend you shared my crazy ways
Now we don't want to miss out on the best part of the day

There must be something universal in the idea that the greatest loves are with someone who is your best friend. If you can't wake up and see them beside you to chase the dreams away and face the best part of the day, then the next best alternative is the voice on the other end of the line who picks up when you call even in the middle of the night. For me it is a song from Neil Diamond from the musical "The Jazz Singer".

Maybe it's been crazy; Maybe I'm too blame
Won't you put your heart above your head
We've been through it all and you've loved me just the same.
When you're not here, I just need to hear Hello

My Little Town

Hill & 6th

Bunker Hill

Downtown Los Angeles

This week's Take This Tune is Mary Chapin Carpenter's "I Am A Town" where she sings of the little towns of the Southern United States that are either disappearing completely or are absorbed in the sprawl of some mushrooming city.  To join in, click on the link above for a prompt for your blog.

The town of my childhood has never been truly small but there was a time when Dorothy Parker is supposed to have called it, "72 suburbs in search of a city".  Now I don't remember it as the pictures of circa 1910 above, but I do remember it from mid century when very distinct towns were separated by wide expanses of farm and grazing lands.  It was a time when people could laugh at Mel Blanc's routine on the  Jack Benny Show about the railroad that joined them with "Anaheim, Azusa, and Cucamonga".   The site of TV Acres remembers it fondly as:

After repeated announcements, the train caller continued "Look we're not asking much. Two of ya, or even one of ya...just somebody to keep the engineer company."

And still later "Please, please! I'll get fired if I don't get somebody on the train for Anaheim, Azusa and Cuuuu-ca-mon-gaaa!"

Now of course, it is one unending sprawl of non stop freeways, houses and businesses from the far northern end of the San Fernando Valley with little interruption all the way to San Diego.

There are still parts of California's Central Valley that resemble the small Southern towns peopled by descendants of transplanted families fleeing the depression Dust Bowl, and you can still see the ramshackle roadside businesses slowly turning to dust as Fresno and Bakersfield reach out to each other in even more suburban sprawl. It is change. For the better? Not quite sure. Still we are all familiar with the places where you can't go home again because as Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, "There's no there there."

Apparently this subject is universal in its appeal as in addition to the wonderful Carpenter song of the south, we can also get memories of the east coast with Paul Simon and "My Little Town"



Take This Tune Also works well with the Music Monday meme.

Come join Music Monday and share your songs with us. Rules are simple. Leave ONLY the actual post link here and grab the code below and place it at your blog entry. You can grab this code at LadyJava's Lounge Please note these links are STRICTLY for Music Monday participants only. All others will be deleted without prejudice.

Take This Tune - Seasons of Love

This week's Take This Tune song is Season's of Love from Rent. It starts with the 525,600 minutes that make a year.  To join in, click on the link above.

The above picture is my Aunt Helen between me (left) and my cousin Wanda (right). The year was 1953 and Chowchilla was a town consisting of one main thoroughfare of less than ten blocks called Robertson Boulevard, about four blocks on either side of private homes, all surrounded by miles of farm land and sheep grazing. On the edge of town was the dangerous place we weren't supposed to go because of the hobos called Berenda Slough.  My parents were in the process of divorcing, my usual alternative home with another aunt was temporarily unavailable, and Aunt Helen came to the rescue.

Unusual for the time period she was divorced, sole support of her daughter and her mother as a registered nurse, and owned her own home which was squeaky spotless.  This remarkable woman took on a niece she had only met once at a family wedding.  Wanda and I attended school together, swam at the city pool together, went to the park together, stopped in at a drug store where you could still get real soda fountain flavored Coca Colas (cherry for her and lemon for me) in those classic glasses.  No one ever locked their doors so we weren't really aware that we were latch key kids totally on our own between school letting out and Aunt Helen coming home to cook.  In an era before McDonald's, she would make full from scratch dinners.  Don't ask me how she did it, because I don't have a clue.  It was a year when the world saw the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II with all it's pomp and circumstance and a year when I knew a simple woman who out of love simply did what was right for two little girls.  The year came to an end when my mother remarried in Aunt Helen's living room and I went off to another place for another year.

Aunt Helen eventually remarried and sold her tiny home to move to a much larger one that faced Robertson Boulevard directly across from the Baptist Church.  Wanda changed her last name to her stepfather's but continued her idyllic small town existence until going off to Fresno for college and another then little town of  Selma when she married.  This has led to a fifty year joke between us about the "Country Mouse" and the "City Mouse".  Today we both have to lock our doors.

While still in the country, Chowchilla is a good sized community, Robertson Blvd leads to the Pacheco Pass that takes you from Central California across the Coastal range and the Berenda Slough is now a recreational area.

Get Over It

This week's Take This Tune is the Eagles "Get Over It".  That choice was semi inspired by Willie Nelson's, There's Nothing I can Do About It Now., and both were chosen as a reflection on life that is summed up with some version of "Stuff Happens".  I am the first to admit that I have no patience with "No Whine served before its time". Give me a break. Do you want to compare horror stories? Sorry about that I win and what's more I don't care that I won. If we ever get into a game of "Truth or Dare", you may know all. In the mean time, I live by my motto of "It's never tooo late to have a happy childhood!" and I've been giggling ever since adopting that as a way of life. Bring on the swings and jungle gyms..

There is one type of TV show that I will not watch from the instant someone starts whinging and whining about some injustice, slight, or tragedy ... not because I'm unsympathetic with trials and tribulations, but because I know that hanging on to the baggage is harder on you than it will ever be on anyone who may have done you wrong.  Now if it is regret over something you have done, take responsibility, then make amends as well as you can.  Clean up as much of the spilled milk as possibile and then try your best to learn from the error of your ways while finding some new sin to commit rather than repeating yourself.

With two disasters happening recently with the flood in Tennessee that wiped out the homes and history of thousands of people and musicians and the British Petroleum oil spew, it is easy to see the difference.  In Tennessee people were helping people clean up while the famous got together for a telethon to provide as much money and support as possible.  Some tears but no whine.  Just rolling up their sleeves and getting it done.  Then there were the gazillionaire BP execs pointing fingers at anybody and everybody they could name and whining about why it wasn't their fault and why is everyone so mad at them, just look at all the oil they produced before things went very very wrong and why should they pay more than "all legitimate claims".  My attitude towards them is not only should they be paying reparations for decades, but that they should consider themselves lucky if they don't end up behind bars.

Maybe they need to take a lesson from Warren Zevon on how to face up to horrible and laugh about it because life isn't for sissies.  It was included on his last album, "Enjoy Every Sandwich", while he knew he was dying from Mesothelioma. and still laughing by including "Poor Pitiful Me"

The Bear's Going Down

This week's Take This Tune is Mark Knopfler's biographical tribute  "Song For Sonny Liston".  I had never heard it until finding it as one of the songs on an album purchased recently.  Boxing has never had a particular appeal, but I remembered the 1964 and 1965 fights simply because of all the publicity around them.  Sonny was the champ.  While people admired the sheer strength and brutality of the man, they didn't like Sonny.  It was a time when boxing was trying to clean up its image.  Sonny's rumored mob connections and flamboyant lifestyle marked him as just the type no one wanted at the top.  Cassius Clay (eventually Muhammad Ali) became the top contender for Sonny Liston's title. He had been the lightweight Olympic Gold Medalist and had wracked up an impressive record professionally.

Clay was not widely expected to win. The fight was scheduled for February 25, 1964 in Miami, Florida.  The promoter, Bill Faversham, was concerned about Clay's association with Malcolm X.  Faversham convinced Clay not to announce his conversion to Islam until after the fight to prevent a loss in ticket sales.  Still, no one expected the fresh faced younger man to defeat Sonny given Liston's overwhelming status as the favorite to win (7–1 odds) despite his bragging, and to Sonny infuriating, poetry recital at weigh in.

Float like a butterfly
Sting like a bee.
Your hands can't hit
What your eyes can't see.

When Sonny failed to return to the ring at the beginning of the seventh round, history was made and Clay was named champion with a TKO and the angry Bear was scheduled for a rematch.   The ending of the 1965 second fight remains one of the most controversial in boxing history.  The "phantom punch" never appeared to have landed yet Sonny went down in the first round and took longer than 10 seconds to stand.  As stated in the Wiki about the fight

There were claims that Liston had bet against himself and "took a dive" because he owed money to the Mafia. Others believe that he feared for his safety from Nation of Islam extremists who supported Ali. The latter theory was supported by Mark Kram's book Ghosts of Manila, which included an interview with Liston conducted years after the fight. Liston claimed to have intentionally lost because of his fear of retaliation from the Black Muslims. No independent substantiation of this claim has come to light.

The mystery over Liston's death in 1971 has never been resolved as his body was discovered several days after he died making cause of death difficult to determine as well as accusations of police cover up with their declaration of a drug overdose.  A friend of Liston's also told "Unsolved Mysteries" that Liston had been in a car accident a few weeks prior to his death. Liston was hospitalized with minor injuries, and received intravenous medicine. This is believed to be the source of the puncture wound that authorities found upon discovering Liston's body not the signs of drug addiction as no drug paraphernalia was found at the site despite and Sonny was known to be a heavy drinker but not a drug user given his fear of needles.

Whatever the true story, Sonny Liston, was a man who survived a hellish childhood, had a successful if brutal career, and may or may not have been murdered.  Knopfler's song brings all that feeling to life.

"Some day they're gonna write a Blues for fighters.

It'll just be for Slow guitar, soft trumpet and a bell."

The Things We Do For Love

This week's Take This Tune as suggested by Linda of Are We There Yet is "The Things We Do For Love" by 10 CC.  It is from their album Deceptive Bends whose cover is shown below.  This sent me off on a wild tangent.

The Deceptive Bends cover art immediately reminded me of The Creature From The Black Lagoon. and all the early 3D movies of the early 50s and as the fad faded all of the apocolyptic monster movies of the era.  Whoever the monster happened to be, they just couldn't seem to keep their hands off the leading lady. 

Creature From The Black Lagoon

Robby the Robot of Forbidden Planet

Now Forbidden Planet was based on Shakespeare's "The Tempest" so naturally I leap frogged to a new movie currently getting ready for release.  The lead character Prospero will get a sex change and become Prospera with Dame Helen Mirren playing the role as directed by Julie Taymor.  During the filming in Hawaii, the cast took advantage of the surroundings and the 63 year old leading lady showed that she could still be something any self respecting monster would be glad to grab.

Does anyone have a way to dam the stream of consciousness?

Whistle Down The Wind

This week's Take This Tune's selection is "Whistle Down The Wind" from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical of the same name.  The meaning of the title is to whistle for something desired that you probably won't get or you will get it, and it will be in the form of "be careful what you ask for".  The term is probably from nautical whistling for a wind when a ship is becalmed and getting too much of a good thing, as in this quote from "Rokeby" by Sir Walter Scott:  “How whistle rash bids tempests roar!”

It immediately made me think of two things:  First, the times in life when I have done what I call "screaming at the universe".  You are hanging on to the end of your rope and the fingers are getting weak.  I'm not quite sure what happens next except that up until now, something has always happened, probably because I haven't overused the technique.  Whether it is unexpected money, help at the instant needed, or just added strength to get through a very bad something.  The other thought was a Garth Brooks song.  Sometimes what we want isn't what is in our best interests.  If you are really, really lucky, those requests fall on very deaf ears.

My Little Town

This week's Take This Tune is all about hometowns. I was born in Paradise.  If you click on the picture above, it will take you to the "Golden Dreams" book in the Kevin Starr series about California from its earliest Spanish years to the disaster level problems facing it now.  Golden Dreams, An Age of Abundance covers the years 1950 - 1963 which for me would be second grade to the the birth of my first child.  In my lifetime Los Angeles has gone from 1.5 million people to 3.7 million people.
Even worse the state has gone from 12 million to 38 million.  Since I can't turn back time, I can at least show you pictures of what "My Little Town" looked like when I was little.

The downtown Hillstreet Theater.  Inside it was one of the great movie palaces despite its rather utilitarian outside.  You had to drive quite a distance on city streets to get downtown until the late .50s  because the Pasadena and Harbor Freeways didn't open until  1940 and 1948 and there was still farmland between the outer and inner suburbs.  If you would like to recreate one of those drives, you can courtesy of Curating The City link for Wilshire Boulevard.

This is the May Company store (Now a museum).  Another reason to drive downtown to see the Christmas decorations in motion in the windows ... a small taste of New York in the California backwater when "The City" meant San Francisco and LA was still where the movie stars and other uncouth yokels lived.

Olivera Street - Part of El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument, Olivera Street was originally known as Wine Street.  It may be a tourist trap but if you have never been to LA, it is a must see part of both the city's history and the amazing culture.

In July 1934 a contingent of farmers pulled their trucks onto the corner of Third and Fairfax in Los Angeles. They displayed their produce on the tailgates of their vehicles.  In 1947 I read a sign for the first time by saying "This table is reserved".  Precocious little 3 year old brat.  The Farmers Market is a magic place.  If someone says, "Meet me at 3rd and Fairfax" - Go.  They are probably a native inviting you for an adventure to one of the must-see tourist attractions in Southern California.

You knew I had to give you a beach.  It was a one mile bike ride from my house (several houses actually because I moved all over the beach cities of Redondo, Manhattan, Hermosa and Santa Monica) ... can you say every weekend unless I was at Disneyland?  Speaking of which ...

Technically not part of LA since it is in Anaheim in Orange County, but it was built by a movie man so Angelenos consider it theirs.  The first day was a madhouse as the crowds overwhelmed the lines.  I got there the first month when I was 11 and they still had "E Ticket Rides".  The favorite period was as a young teen when you could pick up Navy and Army boys at Merry Go Round rock on Tom Sawyer Island and my famous date with a tree ... talk about a more innocent age.

Because Another Wept

This week's Take This Tune is John Prine's "Sam Stone", a graphic song about a veteran who comes home from Viet Nam with PTSD and drug addicted.  The toll both physical and mental that war takes on the men and women sent to fight is horrendous.  You would think the reasons to fight would be good ones.  Unfortunately, this often is more political than patriotic.

Iraq and Afghanistan have resulted in 5396 American deaths in nine years.  So far 30,490 U.S. service members have been wounded due to combat actions in Iraq and 2,309 in Afghanistan (32,799 total).  The signature wounds of this war are amputations and brain injury due to IEDs.  No one questions the heroism of these men and women.  They are doing their duty where their country sends them.  At some point we have to ask, when do we stop sending them?  There will be thousands of men and women receiving medical care for their injuries for decades, and there will be a lot more Sam Stones for whom the battle never ends.

None of the numbers above indicates the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan citizens who have lost their lives or been wounded by the conflict in their nation.  Seeing a child such as the one above always reminds me of W. H. Auden's "Shield of Achilles" and it's closing lines about the shield created by the armorer to the gods for Thetis to give to her son Achilles in the Trojan War.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestus, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.

Take This Tune - What Shower Scene?

This week's Take This Tune is about obsessive fans and the objects of their adoration courtesy of "He Rode All The Way to Texas" and "Superstar". As everyone well knows, it is no secret that I am fond of Hugh Jackman (Sheesh folks I may have crossed the line to "senior", but I still have a pulse). What I can say is that I never confuse reel and real. Should I ever bump  into the gentleman, it would be a handshake and "It's a pleasure to meet you" and I wouldn't ask for an autograph because Californians of my era DON'T DO THAT for the simple reason that performance time and private time are two different spheres and "private time" is never to be violated.

Most fans who enjoy an artist rate somewhere along an acceptable range from "I like him/her" to "I see everything ever made or written and lust for more". Then there are those who tip over the edge into some world of obsessive fantasy. The ones who stalk, follow from city to city, turn up in private homes, or actually threaten or injure a star and their family. You have to wonder what is missing from their life that an imaginary relationship has become so desirable or how papparazzi coverage can prod the mentally ill into real and dangerous action.

Hugh Jackman made a movie called Australia.  That movie contained a shower scene for which the majority of women and a certain percentage of men are very, very grateful.  How popular is this particular scene?  Add all of the multiple You Tube postings and it has had several hundred thousand viewings.  Google it and you get over one million references for the shower alone on blog and news sites.  That doesn't include all the possible permutations of searches and uploads that you didn't think of while searching or the almost four million references on his name alone.

Now one fan took that scene, slowed it down, put it in closeup,  highlighted stills, put it on continuous loop and then used the music of Air and the song "Sexy Boy" for the audio.   Frankly she did a better job than the actual editor of the movie which, while a lot of fun as whip lash and bodice rippers go, suffered from scads of technical problems, history mistakes and continuity errors.  Enough to make you wonder why the script supervisor and match move / CGI staff weren't fired on day two of the shoot.  The movie is saved by a fun if derivative story line and great  acting by the whole cast rising above the problems.   Maybe Baz Luhrman should have hired the You Tube lady. 

Fortunately, nothing about this gift given to anyone who likes a beautiful wet male body hints of the dangerous, so sit back and enjoy while remembering that the real man was creating an iconic character, is married, actually seems to love his wife, and truly enjoys his children.  Now back to a good fantasy.

Let Me Be Your Rider Now

This week's Take This Tune is the delightfully double entendre verses of "Red Staggerwing".  Confession time. I love songs filled with double meanings and sly innuendos simply because I love word play.   Let's face it, even Shakespeare dabbled in hints of goings on.  It doesn't matter if it is Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered with the original lyrics rather than the cleaned up variety or this weeks' decidedly R rated song courtesy of Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris.  What can I say except:

Red Staggerwing immediately reminded me of the ex-husband who played guitar and built model airplanes from scratch (no kits).  So I bought him a 12 string and then I designed a plane for him to build.  It was called "The Peregrin" named after the fastest of the hunting birds.  It was bright red and it's wings tapered back similar to a jet aircraft, so our "taperwing" was a scarlet woman from the get to.   It was simply the fastest control line stunt plane ever flown.  Unfortunately, it's design was not meant to do acrobatic stunts at those speeds and it eventually developed stress cracks where the wings joined the body and could no longer fly.  But it was beautiful.  Like the marriage it had it's moments as when he would play Steamroller Blues (another somewhat raunchy song).     When it was bad .... it cracked under stress.

So down below are all the fast and beautiful things that fly, roar, and sing as metaphors for when it's good it's very, very good.



If i was staggerwing plane
A staggerwing painted red
I'd fly over to your house, baby
Buzz you in your bed

If I was a taperwing
A taperwing painted blue
I'd be barrell-rolling over you

If i was a Maserati

A red 300s

I'd ride around to your house, baby

Give you a driving test

If i was a mustang racer

White with a stripe of blue]

You could ride me,baby

Whenever you wanted to

If i was a fender guitar

A fender painted red

You could play me, darlin'

Until your fingers bled

If i was one of them gibsons

Like a '58 or '9

You could plug me in

And play me anytime

If i was a motorcycle

A vincent red rapide

I'd ride around to your house, baby

Get you up to speed

If i was short track racer
I'd be an indian
You could ride me around
And ride me round again

You're gonna need a rider anyhow

Let me be your rider now

Now go have fun.