http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwK9JZcob5c

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHA_S48KRrI

The video is from the 1966 Bollywood film Gumnaam. It is sung by Bollywood legend Mohammed Rafi and is entitled ‘Jan Pehechan-Ho.’ And, no, I don’t know what is going in the film or what the title means (nor, for the most part, do I ever), but that doesn’t change the fact that I love the song.

Thanks, Gina.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEYN5w4T_aM

That, of course, was the clean version. You can find unexpurgated versions of the song if you look, but I like the Western theme of this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6md5RSnVUuo

I don’t want to get to technical about the meaning of this song, except to say that it may not be about sucking too hard on lollipops (in the same way that Serge Gainsbourg’s “Les Sucettes” was not about sucking too hard on anise popsicles). He seems to be warning young girls about the dangers of being slutty and sucking too hard on other people’s ‘lollipops’ (wink, wink, say no more) rather than looking for true love.

If I was really cynical, I would say that he is not talking about girls at all (he does start the song with a shout out to himself with a “Hey, Mika!”), but about himself as a man who is recalling a walk with his mother one day and has heard her motherly advice. “Love’s going to get you down,” says mother, if you engage in deeper emotional attachments with women. This might mean that he should not “suck too hard on [life's] lollipop” but should instead cause him to drift freely from woman to woman with meaningless emotional attachments, ensuring that love won’t get him down, while keeping her darling boy attached to his mother and no other as his chief emotional attachment.

But then we get to Mika’s homosexuality. The Queer Beacon insists that he is in fact gay, but he himself will not say (Wikipedia), perhaps because it would hurt his album sales (which it probably would) but more likely because defining himself would limit his quality as an artist of being everything to everyone without limits.

If this is the case (and I’m not saying that it is), then maybe he is retreating to an infantile fantasy in which his life has not been defined by his growth into his sexuality, which he might think is misplaced. If nature was just, he should have been a woman. Since nature is what it is, he must travel in the shadows of nature, being what nature made him: a woman trapped in a man’s body, struggling to break out but fearful of consequences (which can be horrible) at the same time.

Now that he’s grown older, and into his sexuality, he’s realized that he is by nature a homosexual and he must suck penises of risk the very fate his mother had warned him about as the fate of normal heterosexual men. They will be brought down by sucking too hard on penises, but it is exactly that that will save him, the unnatural man. Unless he does this, his creative spirit will be stifled and he will not have “stood on his own two feet” and expressed himself.

And so Mika betrays his mother by “sucking too hard” on penises, but he is modest, not for his own sake, but for the sake of his mother, who has warned him of “what people say.” So he reverts to a childhood fantasy of metaphor in which men are transformed into boys, boys into girls, and penises into lollipops. Those in the know, know; those who don’t can take comfort in a sweet song of childhood innocence, much like “Les Sucettes” that so disturbed France Gall when she was old enough to know what Serge was doing to her, pulling her strings and making her into a “Puppet on a String” without her knowledge or consent.

Grace Kelly

Then there are Mika’s role models, which he cites in his song ‘Grace Kelly.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaEPCsQ4608

Once again, he’s talking to a young girl, but she speaks in voice of a woman much older that she is and in the stilted accent of a noir femme fatale in a B-movie (although I have watched every available film noir in Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, I cannot identify the film).

After being rebuffed, he tries to hook up with her by becoming “Grace Kelly.” But if not Grace Kelly, he’s not all that picky, and he tries on other personas, including gay icon Freddie Mercury. But in the end, it really doesn’t matter what persona he takes. All that matters is that the “other” “likes him without making [him] try.” His natural inclination is to be loved for himself alone, but that means giving up the standard existential identity appropriate for “natural” man.

He could be any number of things:

I could be brown
I could be blue
I could be violet sky
I could be hurtful
I could be purple
I could be anything you like
Gotta be green
Gotta be mean
Gotta be everything more

This behavior translates him out of his lonely world and back to being “the artist as everyman for everyman” in much the same way as Woody Allen is everyone and no one at the same time in Zelig.

This is the origin of costume and masks which we wear, not just once a year but everyday of our lives, whether we are heterosexuals of homosexuals. We may want to tear off the masks, or we may want to hide behind them for a little while longer. But in any case, neither extreme position is reachable. Mika (if he is in fact gay) can never abandon himself to become a true Zelig (such people tend to end up believing that they are gods) anymore than he can become an isolated person all to himself (such people are sociopaths). All passes through an imaginative and by nature distorting metaphor before reaching our minds as “truth.”

On the other hand, maybe that’s just me.

Happy Halloween!

Everyone (including me) believed this when I was in graduate school, but it put a premium on aligning oneself with Derrida’s skepticism. Those who believed in skepticism were in the know (and what a contradiction is implied in that formulation!) and could be allowed into the academic inner circle. All my professors attempted to do with me the entire time I was in graduate school was to lecture me on my own misbehavior based on my own misconfiguration of the problem. In their minds, Derrida had solved a problem that had bedeviled a lot of the best literary critics of the previous generation. And who was I, after all, to question them or Derrida? When I continued to ask thorny question (like how it was possible to know anything in a universe in which all our knowledge of anything can be deconstructed), I was shunned as an unbeliever (another problem in a skeptical universe; who gets to call it art in a relative universe but those who are in positions of power already? I have discussed this here, if you’re interested). See 1:20 in the following video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsGYh8AacgY

When I was in graduate school, I had no answers to my belief that something was wrong in the graduate school universe, and I wrote my dissertation more in the spirit of inquiry into method than actually answering the questions I was raising. It wasn’t until I got out of graduate school and started reading old books in my now abundant leisure time that I found what I had been looking for all along, and in the most unlikely place. Augustine, who I had been avoiding along with Plato on account of his reputation in D. W. Roberston, Jr.’s A Preface to Chaucer, had held the answer all along. I change it a bit in my work, though.

Both of my latest works are separate attempts to answer my graduate school critics by deconstructing deconstruction on the basis of my new found confidence in a world that persist in spite of academic doubts about its existence (I’m quoting myself here; weird). In my work of satire, I make the case that artists and literary critics, and not the usual scapegoat of the bourgeoisie, have placed their spears in the shifting ground of a deconstructable universe as though they had found solid ground. Within the world of fiction, I point to some of my favorite works of fiction that have led artists and critics to set up as arbiters of faith in a thoroughly deconstructable universe. Only artists and critics are exempt from deconstruction, and they get quite upset when someone tells them that they are not.

In my work, I point out as gently as I can (because I modeled my main character on myself) that his youthful dreams of transcendence are totally unrealistic. But he refuses to see the world more realistically, as my antagonist, who is also based on another aspect of myself, does. In the end, neither of those two me-based people have the answers to the question of transcendence.

Gentle Giant’s Mr. Class and Quality

As a result of my thoughts in recent weeks, the lyrics to this song, Gentle Giant‘s ‘Mr. Class and Quality,’ have been on my mind. In them, the writers give vent to their feelings about the limitations of the bourgeois “middleman” who travels within strictly restricted boundaries. Their feeling is that the “middle” is nothing more than a detour from the “end” of literary experience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvNzZ7RXQtM

Look around my rooms and see the prizes I have showing
Working hard to build my life and plan the way I’m going
House and car and pretty wife – they’ve all been won by knowing
All been won by knowing
All been won by knowing.

Paperwork, white collared shirts – where would we be without them
Man of class and quality – I never shout about them
Choose my friends for my own ends. You can’t succeed without them
Can’t succeed without them
Can’t succeed without them.

Middleman sees straight ahead and never crosses borders
Never understood the artist or the lazy workers
The world needs steady men like me to give and take the orders
Give and take the orders
Give and take the orders.

The bourgeois man has trophies of his accomplishment (“prizes I have showing”) as the result of his “hard work” and his “planning.” But, as everyone knows or should know, life throws us curves out of left field. It is in our reactions to unforeseen events that we should measure a man, and not on the basis of how much “paperwork” a man wearing “white-collared shirts” who “never crosses borders” has managed to fill out in his lifetime.

The moral of the song is that people who think they know based on giving and taking orders have not reached true knowledge, because the path that they have taken leads one down a path without looking for or thinking about other ways of looking at the world. The bourgeois way of “knowing” is contrasted with the more open knowing of people like “us,” who embrace the very pleasures of not knowing what is coming next. This, in the 1960s was equated with freedom. And if, like me, you were alive in the 1960s and were under 30 years of age, you could partake in the new world. And if you were over 30, you could partake if you gave up your attachments to things like order and solid middle class values. But some people wouldn’t budge, and they became the enemies of right-minded thought.

My Name Is Nobody

That is essentially the plot of Sergio Leone’s My Name Is Nobody:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RYq1PLdT0s

In that film, Leone pays a final tribute to his beloved Western genre, even as he kills it. My Name Is Nobody is the story of an aging gunfighter (played by Henry Fonda) who meets a young gunfighter (played by Terrence Hill). When he meets the young man, the old man takes it as a challenge. He is prepared to fight it out once more, but the under-30 Nobody (played, as I said, by Terrence Hill) has other plans for Henry. Rather than making him into a martyr, Nobody plans to make Henry into one of the greatest heroes ever by having him kill more men than have ever been killed in a single gunfight before: the 150 members of The Wild Bunch (the title of another Western by Sam Peckinpah; Leone loved Peckinpah; see this clip for Terrence Hill’s homage to him in the film). He succeeds, and this move takes Henry Fonda out of his ordinary life day to say life as a gunfighter who is constantly meeting up with people who want to kill him and transports him to the realm of heroes. Only then can he live out the rest of his life in peace and quiet.

In my opinion, Leone thought he was transporting his linear heroes of his youth into a more timeless universe of art. When I was a young man (in the 60s and 70s), I, too, want to live in that timeless universe of poetry, much as Yeats transported himself from the daily back-and-forth of existence to an existence in which he could be at one with himself as a golden bird singing songs to drowsy Emperor (see my post on Creed’s Higher), but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen that such a world can only exist in fiction.

If I wanted to recreate it in fact, I would have to pretend that I, like Yeats, wasn’t seeing what I was seeing. This is my opinion of many of the most strident people in academia. It’s not that they don’t mean well (they do), but they do not acknowledge any change of state in their reconfiguring their universe from one based in reality to one based in an unrealizable fiction.

My Post-Academic Life

It was not apparent just how big a break this involved with the premises I had been working with for my whole life until I was out of graduate school school. Then I took some time to read 100 books on all aspects of business, reasoning that I knew nothing about how business works. I was stunned when I realized that the premises on which I had been working within academia were not the premises that obtained outside of academia. I was shocked, but I was also curious. Realizing that I hadn’t been all that happy in academia in the first place and realizing that there were few jobs available anyway, I decided to take my chances on becoming an entrepreneur, where the rewards were better and the pressure put on me to conform was significantly less.

I have never had a problem with my academic friends, who seem to me to have a far deeper and broader appreciation for life than someone like Rush Limbaugh, who has a more commonsense approach to money than those who believe that “others” pursue money for its own sake; but within academia, I was viewed only as the sort of person who must be lectured to. If I wouldn’t listen to reason, I would be (and should be) tossed aside for more reasonable men who had the sense to agree with what everyone was saying about artistic experience. When I got out of academia, I was subject to criticism by conservatives (and even my own dear lovely and far too liberal wife) as being too liberal on some topics. As I’ve said before, this has left me feeling as though I’m a man without a country. I wanted nothing more than to be left alone with my free thoughts, and I found that within and without academia, free thought comes with a steep price after all.

My Novels and Books

I’m willing to pay that price, because I know that it is the price of freedom, and America’s greatness in the world has been fixed to our ability (until the recent death of Steve Jobs) to come up with new ideas (telephones, automobiles, jazz, airplanes, transistors, rock and roll, computers, rocket ships, rap, etc. have all been American led inventions). In my work, I want to bring America back from the artistic abyssal world of Nobody to the world of time, in which Creed can return again and again (and even again, if necessary) from the static and so impossible world of Nobody’s unity to a world in which people have to live their lives one moment in time without convenient refuge in a world of fiction that can never be in fact.

I Come Through

It has taken me years to get to the point where I feel I have a new idea that everyone is unconsciencoiusly aware of of but no one has yet expressed. Because of this this, I expect to be misunderstood by anybody who reads this far (and let’s be serious, nobody will), but my world of temporary fiction also finds its ground in the 1960s, in which Paul McCartney and the Beatles could sing ridiculous fantasies about women who came in through the bathroom windows (not as people are supposed to through doors but who did not have enough sense to know that her version of reality is distorted by an also magical silver spoon (not gold, as it was in Yeats’ poem). This version is by Joe Cocker, because, let’s face it, that guy can sing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiXh2gnasw0

When the young woman comes in through the bathroom window, she wanders by her own lagoon (a Spenserian argument if there ever was one) but she, like Redcrosse, is a baby in her own mind, being young enough to still be sucking her thumb and so not old enough to have discarded the silver spoon that covers her ignorance of the way the world actually works. The way the world actually works is through time, as Sunday’s on the phone to Monday, and Tuesday’s on the phone to Wednesday, all the way back to Sunday, when the whole cycle starts all over again (it never gets back to me, as Joyce’s masterpiece Finnegans Wake didn’t either). This reminds my over-trained literary mind of the reference to the omphalos in James Joyce’s other masterpiece, Ulysses in which he imagines the impossible dream of being able to get back to Eden through his mother’s mother’s mother…until he gets back to the historical Eve from whom all women sprang.

It doesn’t work; and the reason is quite clear to anyone who has never read a book in their life. It doesn’t work because it is patently ridiculous to believe that unseen things do exist (like imaginary chains that link us back through our mother’s womb to Eve) while seen things (like the beach to which Stephen closes his eyes to in order to imagine such nonsense) do not. But because they have long histories in literary history, those who dedicate their lives to reading frequently think that they indicate a deeper purpose of meaning in the universe and not just nonsense. This is because James Joyce said so, and he was a genius, and geniuses wouldn’t say such things unless there was more than a kernel of truth in what he ways. This is also the reason that the worst offenders in this respect are not the ignorant with their abundant common sense, but airy academics, who believe that what they read in texts must somewhere exist in the real world and cannot be a complete fantasy. Charlie, in the fantasy above, was right when he complains that there is no such thing as a candy mountain. For not believing his senses, he is punished with the loss of a kidney.

I obviously disagree with my academic colleagues and friends, but then who am I do contradict so many great and powerful thinkers?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BYvxFrDZ4M

This is my favorite song featured in a film noir, usually a distinctly un-musical genre (excepting, of course, Tarentino’s Pulp Fiction) . I’ve told you before of my project of watching every film noir available on Netflix. I watched over 150 film noirs before exhausting their collection.

Anyway, here is my favorite song sung by Amy Irving.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy5THitqPBw

As they note on the Wikipedia page devoted to the song has a long history as one of the earliest jazz and blues standards after it was recorded by Benny Goodman, with vocals by Peggy Lee:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdqvX-n25gs

But before it was recorded by the Benny Goodman Orchestra and became a jazz and blues standard, it “first appeared in 1936 as “The Weed Smoker’s Dream”, composed by McCoy and recorded by his band, the Harlem Hamfats” (Wikipedia). He changed the lyrics, probably in response to the War on Drugs that erupted 30 years later.

The original lyrics written by Kansas Joe McCoy were as follows:

Fay’s a betting woman
She bets on every hand
She’s a trickin’ mother for you every-
where she land
Why don’t you do now
like the millionaires do
Put yourself on the market
And make a million too

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyjW8FTGxbI

Here, on the other hand, is Kansas Joe’s cleaned up version:

You’re sittin’ down and wonderin’ what it’s all about
You ain’t got no money, they will put you out
Why don’t you do right, like some other men do?
Get out of here and get me some money too

In the 1940s through the 1950s, this was thought to empower women. Thank God we learned that lesson.

My favorite version of this song (for sentimental reasons) is by Julie London, who my father probably remembers like this

but whom I remember from her brief stint of television as beautiful nurse Dixie McCall in television’s Emergency (pictured here with her costar, Bobby Troup, writer of the song Route 66)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2f40eQcYXk

Thanks again, Ruth.

But the other day, I asked my friend Ruth to send me more suggestions, and this time she sent me the music of The Be Good Tanyas. Well, I got excited at once, because with a name like The Be Good Tanyas, it has to be good. And lo and behold, on the second song I listened to, they were playing (oh my heart of hearts) a BANJO! (See here for the reasons that I truly love the banjo).

And that was not all. The second song I listened to also had a garden theme. Well, I hate gardening, but I am not indifferent to looking at other people work in their gardens. That includes my wife, who loves her garden (I love her in spite of this). And wouuldn’t you know it, I love this song. So I made a tape of it, and gave it to her to listen to on the way to work. But I couldn’t wait to share them with you.

Here is my favorite song by The Be Good Tanyas. It’s called ‘Ship Out On the Sea.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4pKjCg25vQ

I think I will put this song on my list of music to play at my funeral. It is no accident that the songwriter uses a theme she derives one of the themes from Syd Barrett’s ‘Jugband Blues,’ one of the most insane lyrics of my insane adolescence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTtXVrANEhU

You wouldn’t think country music people would be citing the insanity of Syd.

My second favorite song has a dog theme (I don’t really listen to lyrics, being far more interested in the complex rhythms and time signatures than lyrics sung by Britney Spears). That’s off the point. The song is called “Dogsong.’ It, too, fronts a solid banjo line.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vegIqp4l2U

The first song I listened to was called ‘The Littlest Birds.’ It, too, is sublime, although it’s lacking the twang of the old banjo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdIhpkEkC4c

This is by far the best band I have discovered this year. Thanks again, Ruth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4aDDB_0v4o

Like the guy who posted this next video, called ‘Maradona,’ I cannot believe that these guys are not more famous. But then, I cannot believe that Andrea isn’t more famous. Oh well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNuCfCmUuj4

Last, but certainly not least, Tatrai presents a little Peter Frampton action, for you enjoyment. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYAgkAtn1l4

My favorite song in the movie is ‘Dance With Me Tonight’:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-i8-M075Uw

But, of course, there’s the title song which is not too shabby:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzllVlzzeuo

Hanks actually wrote some of the music himself, and that tells me all I need to know why he’s a film icon but hasn’t necessarily gone on to write a whole lot of other songs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F0Hg4vAir0

His appearance – tight trousers, loose, unbuttoned shirts or tight T-shirts – and his new hairdo set a trend among young Turkish men, who started to copy his looks. According to hairdressers, his Kuzu Kuzu [seen on the original Arab Pop post] hairstyle is still the most frequently requested style in the salons of Turkey. (Wikipedia)

He sings my favorite song of this week, ‘Dilli Duduk’:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VqIgDFmKNs

You can download the song for free from Amazon as part of a collection of ‘Turkish Hits.’

I’m trying to get my wife to respect my taste in music after she and I had a conversation about differences in our tastes. She likes lyrics, whereas I am more attracted to music with fast and complicated rhythm schemes, or blazing speed. So, of course, I made her a CD of songs designed to appeal to her tastes including Fiona Apple’s ‘Extraordinary Machine,’ Joni Mitchell, and Garbage. But I couldn’t help myself and put ‘Dilli Duduk’ first, virtually guaranteeing that she won’t listen to the rest of the CD. Oh well, who am I to insist that anybody else listen to my music of read my books anyway?

That doesn’t take away from the fact that Tarkan’s impact on European Pop music has been great. Wikipedia has this to say to say about that:

He has also been listed by Rhapsody as a key artist in the history of European pop music, with his signature song “Simarik” as a keystone track that moved the genre forward.

With that in mind, I thought I’d give you a chance to listen to his ‘Simarik’:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKYeODP-Sek

Enjoy!