The Art of the Remake, XIX

I heard the sad news of Christine McVie’s passing yesterday. I always loved her voice and she wrote some amazing songs.

Remember the standard:
“If you are going to cover a song, rip it apart a bit and make it your own.”

Here’s “Everywhere” by Darling West:

Why I’m Not Pledging

The local public radio station here in concert with all the other public radio stations across this blessed land of ours is having their fall pledge drive this week. And I am defiantly not pledging to support. I am willfully and maliciously denying them my dollars and support, in spite of all their blandishments and incessant, unrelenting guilt trips. This, in spite of the fact that I worked part-time for the classical music side of that enterprise some decades past, before all the part-time announcers were let go. I thought for weeks that it was only me, that my announcing work was unsat. Honestly, I wouldn’t have been surprised if that was the reason, as I had gone very rote and mechanical over announcing the name of the piece of music up next, the composer and performing orchestra or soloist, and throwing in a bit of relevant information about the piece. No, it wasn’t me, as I later found out; they left all the other part-time shift announcers go the girl who worked during the week at an animal shelter, the woman who was a mainstay of the local little theater group, the guy who was a full-time writer for various little local publications. All of us were served notice; a kind of Friday Night employment massacre.

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Brian Deese — The Musical Tribute Continues

I first heard of Brian Deese during the Obama administration, when he was appointed as one of the ‘Czars’ for the auto industry…and I was inspired to write this little song.   (with apologies to Gilbert & Sullivan)

I see that Mr Deese–now the Director of the National Economic Council–is much in the news lately, most recently for this interchange:

CNN: “What do you say to those families that say, ‘listen, we can’t afford to pay $4.85 a gallon for months, if not years?'”
BIDEN ADVISOR BRIAN DEESE: “This is about the future of the Liberal World Order and we have to stand firm.”

So, I saw no alternative other than to resort again to a musical form of expression.   Here, to be sung to the tune of “I’ve been working on the railroad”, is the next song in my continuing tribute to Mr. Deese:

I’ve been workin’ up at Blackrock
All the livelong day
Hung out there during the Trump years
Yeah, I really liked the pay!

Had to package those investments
Rise up so early in the morn
Hear the other partners shouting
‘Brian, blow our ESG horn’

Now I’m back here in the government
Washington, DC
Surely speaks well for Joe Biden
That he’s impressed with me

I explain that economic problems
Are surely not our fault at all
Whatever it may be the numbers say
Or those charts up on the wall

Someone’s in the kitchen with the data
Someone’s in the kitchen I know-o-0-0
Someone’s in the kitchen with data
Watching the inflation quickly grow

And singing
Fee-Fi-Fiddly-I-O
CPI and PPI up wo-wo-wo-wo
Fee-Fi-Fidly-I-O
Watching the inflation quickly grow

What you going to do about it, Brian?
What are you and Biden going to about it woo-woo-woo-woo
What you going to do about infla-tion
Seems like the folks are getting a clue

They’re singing
Fee-Fi-Fiddly-I-O
Can’t afford to drive or eat wo-wo-wo-wo
Can’t afford to pay our rent or mort-gage
Watching the inflation quickly grow

Need to polish up that narrative
Why there’s nothing we could do
Have to let the prices rocket up
Or the Liberal World Order is so screwed

We’re singing
Fee-Fi-Fiddly-I-O
Nothing we could do about it wo-wo-wo-wo
Fee-Fi-Fiddly-I-O
It’s best to let those energy prices grow

Christmas 2021

Newgrange  is  an ancient structure in Ireland so constructed that the sun, at the exact time of the winter solstice, shines directly down a long corridor and illuminates the inner chamber. More about Newgrange  here  and  here.

Grim  has an Arthurian passage about the Solstice.

Don Sensing has thoughts astronomical, historical, and theological about  the Star of Bethlehem.

Vienna Boys Choir, from Maggie’s Farm

Snowflakes and snow crystals, from Cal Tech. Lots of great photos

In the bleak midwinter, from King’s College Cambridge

The  first radio broadcast of voice and music  took place on Christmas Eve, 1906.  (although there is debate about the historical veracity of this story)

An air traffic control version of  The Night Before Christmas.

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, sung by  Enya

Gerard Manley Hopkins

A Christmas-appropriate poem from  Rudyard Kipling

Another poem, by Robert Buchanan

I was curious as to what the oldest Christmas carol might be:  this Billboard article  suggests some possibilities.

The story of electric Christmas tree lights

Mona Charen, who is Jewish, wonders  what’s going on with the Christians?

The 2017 Christmas season, in combination with the Churchill movie  Darkest Hour, reminded me something written by the French author Georges Bernanos:  A Tale for Children.

Here’s a passage I’ve always liked from Thomas Pynchon’s great novel  Gravity’s Rainbow.  The setting: it is the grim winter of 1944, just before Christmas. The military situation in Europe is not good, and WWII seems as if it will never end. London is under attack by V-2 rockets and V-1 cruise missiles (as they would be called today.) Roger and Jessica, two of the main characters, are driving in a rural area in England and come upon a church where carols are being sung. They decide to go inside.


They walked through the tracks of all the others in the snow, she gravely on his arm, wind blowing her hair to snarls, heels slipping once on ice. “To hear the music,” he explained.

Tonight’s scratch choir was all male, epauletted shoulders visible under the wide necks of white robes, and many faces nearly as white with the exhaustion of soaked and muddy fields, midwatches, cables strummed by the nervous balloons sunfishing in the clouds, tents whose lights inside shone nuclear at twilight, soullike, through the cross-hatched walls, turning canvas to fine gauze, while the wind drummed there…..The children are away dreaming, but the Empire has no place for dreams and it’s Adults Only in here tonight, here in this refuge with the lamps burning deep, in pre-Cambrian exhalation, savory as food cooking, heavy as soot. And 60 miles up the rockets hanging the measureless instant over the black North Sea before the fall, ever faster, to orange heat, Christmas star, in helpless plunge to Earth. Lower in the sky the flying bombs are out too, roaring like the Adversary, seeking whom they may devour. It’s a long walk home tonight. Listen to this mock-angel singing, let your communion be at least in listening, even if they are not spokesmen for your exact hopes, your exact, darkest terror, listen. There must have been evensong here long before the news of Christ. Surely for as long as there have been nights bad as this onesomething to raise the possibility of another night that could actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are: for the one night, leaving only the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw, almost too frail, there’s too much shit in these streets, camels and other beasts stir heavily outside, each hoof a chance to wipe him out…….But on the way home tonight, you wish you’d picked him up, held him a bit. Just held him, very close to your heart, his cheek by the hollow of your shoulder, full of sleep. As if it were you who could, somehow, save him. For the moment not caring who you’re supposed to be registered as. For the moment, anyway, no longer who the Caesars say you are.

O Jesu parvule
Nach dir is mir so weh…

So this pickup group, these exiles and horny kids, sullen civilians called up in their middle age…….give you this evensong, climaxing now with its rising fragment of some ancient scale, voices overlapping threee and fourfold, filling the entire hollow of the churchno counterfeit baby, no announcement of the Kingdom, not even a try at warming or lighting this terrible night, only, damn us, our scruffy obligatory little cry, our maximum reach outwardpraise be to God!for you to take back to your war-address, your war-identity, across the snow’s footprints and tire tracks finally to the path you must create by yourself, alone in the dark. Whether you want it or not, whatever seas you have crossed, the way home…