Random 5: Going home edition

It’s been a long week at the RSA Conference in San Francisco and I’m happy to be headed home today. Thankfully I have a random 5 to help me unwind!

  1. Water Wheel – Steve Gunn (Time Off). An interestingly meditative song, this was my introduction to Gunn, who’s a heck of an artist of sunbaked American primitive guitar.
  2. Tightly – Neko Case (Blacklisted). Still a great album almost 15 years later, the shambling grace of this track always makes me smile.
  3. The Bronx Bird Watcher – Allan Sherman (My Son, the Celebrity). “On the branch of a tree sat a little tom tit, singing willow, tid willow, tid willow/An uncomfortable place for a boidie to sit, singing willow, tid willow, tid willow.” Even more than Weird Al, I owe my weird sense of humor to Allan Sherman, and specifically to this album.
  4. She’s Lost Control – Joy Division (Unknown Pleasures). Of Joy Division’s short canon, this is not one of the most essential tracks. The lyrics set the pattern for a bunch of bad songs from bands like Interpol and Black Angels. And yet. The tightly wound guitar that simmers until it boils, the metronomic regularity of the bone dry drum kit, that bass.
  5. Quiet Steam – Peter Gabriel (Digging in the Dirt). Still by far my favorite take on this song from Us, it holds on by its fingernails to quiet, with only the guitar and slowly building organ chords hinting at what lies underneath. I’m not sure the song gained more than it lost when it transformed into the brass driven version on the final album.

BTW, If you’re interested in the sorts of things I was learning about at the conference, check out a few Storify stories here:

Links roundup

It’s been a busy week at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, so I’m just going to summarize a few things that interested me enough to put them on Delicious or otherwise check ’em out.

Doom and Gloom from the Tomb: Grand Banks – QB4: 1877–1896. This week’s Bandcamp Monday on this great music and bootlegs blog featured my friend and fellow Glee Club fossil Tyler Magill’s band Grand Banks and their first label release. I’ve been enjoying their self-released stuff a lot and am looking forward to this one.

Bill Peschel: Sherlock Holmes Outwitted: The Adventure of the ‘Hot Feet.’ Reprinting, with annotations, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche from the 1904 Corks and Curls. Usually student parodies are too full of in-jokes to be readable but this one comes off. It’s also notable due to its authorship by Armistead Dobie, future UVA law school professor and federal judge. Peschel gets most of the annotations right, only missing in calling College Topics a literary magazine (it was the school newspaper, the early incarnation of the Cavalier Daily).

Krebs on Security: Credit Unions Feeling Pinch in Wendy’s Breach. Two things: first, what is it going to take to get merchants to move away from swiping (extremely vulnerable to theft of credit card info) to dipping the chip? Second, if you use a debit card at merchants, please stop. You’re putting your bank account at risk with every swipe.

Virginia Memory: Forsaken: The Digital Bibliography. Fantastic project linking the plot and characters of the novel by Ross Howell, Jr. to their real-life counterparts using information from the Library of Virginia’s archives. Makes me want to go out and buy the book.

Ballads

Historical marker in Hot Springs, North Carolina
Historical marker in Hot Springs, North Carolina

I’ve written before about traditional ballads and ballad collectors, but I always feel as though I am discovering new things about the way in which songs are written and passed down. The archetypal music developed (not written) by singers in places as diverse as rural England and western North Carolina and continuing into modern day provenance via folk singers like Dylan and Leadbelly, who then inspired a whole generation of rock musicians to embrace the ballads…

I always feel an electric shock when I find an artifact of balladry. In September 2015 I was lucky enough to discover UVa professor Ernest Mead’s copy of UVA professor and Glee Club alum Arthur Kyle Davis’s More Traditional Ballads of Virginia in a local used book store, documenting the work that he and other members of the Virginia Folklore Society did in collecting ballads from Virginia singers. Last week I had a bill for dinner delivered to me in an 1879 book collecting English ballads (albeit a little heavily focused on lords and kings for my tastes). And of course my discovery years ago that I have western North Carolina’s preeminent folklorist, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, as a distant relative was one of my early connections to the tradition.

What’s interesting to me is that the application of this “oral tradition” to other forms of song, like camp meeting songs and minstrel songs, resulted in some of the most enduring songs that we remember today in the context of universities and student songs. It’s one thing to note that the University of Virginia song “Glory to Virginia” is a football song with words set to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It’s another to note that the “Battle Hymn” itself takes a tune that was previously known as “John Brown’s Body,” featuring words collectively written by the members of the 2nd Infantry Battalion of the Massachusetts militia as a marching tune. But the story doesn’t stop there; the “Tiger” battalion used a tune for their words that had originated as a camp meeting song in the late 18th and early 19th century, “Say, Brothers, Won’t You Meet Us,” with the earliest printed version of the tune appearing from 1806 to 1808 in camp meeting song compilations. And beyond that, credit for the inspiration of the tune is given to an African American wedding song from Georgia, a “Negro folk song,” and a British sea shanty that originated as a Swedish drinking song.

All of which is just to say that authorship is complicated and history is everywhere.

Virginia secret societies and North Korea

On Sunday, details emerged in the case of Otto Warmbier, a University of Virginia student being detained in North Korea after an arrest two months ago as he prepared to depart the country. In a televised press conference, Warmbier confessed to attempting to steal a banner bearing a North Korean revolutionary slogan. He apologized for his “severe” crime and said that he was encouraged to commit the crime by the Friendship United Methodist Church, the Z Society, and the CIA. He begged for mercy, saying, “I beg that you see how I was used and manipulated. My reward for my crime was so much smaller than the rewards that the Z Society and the Friendship United Methodist Church get from the United States administration.”

Let me be clear: I’m very worried for Warmbier and don’t mean to make fun of his captivity, and hope he is returned soon. But to be honest, were the stakes not so high, this would read like world class trolling. For one thing, it’s pretty unlikely that the UMC is involved in funding petty theft of the sort practiced by university students with road signs on their walls all over the world. But what is the likelihood that the Z Society is involved?

Answer: pretty low. While you can choose to accept or not the Z Society’s denial of contact with Warmbier, the likelihood of their encouraging international hooliganism is quite low. The Z Society has always been the most staid of the University’s semi-secret societies, especially when compared with Eli Banana and their tradition of public processions with a huge bass drum, or the IMPs and their devil costumes and pyromania (not to mention their predecessors’ fun with taxidermy).

So: I think Warmbier is being forced to confess to his crime by a North Korean government that employs scriptwriters with overactive imaginations and inadequate research. If you’re going to frame an undergraduate for espionage, at least blame the right secret society.

Hot Feet: Lewis D. Crenshaw

Lewis Dabney Crenshaw, Paris 1918, courtesy UVA Special Collections.
Lewis Dabney Crenshaw, Paris 1918, courtesy UVA Special Collections.

On an airplane flight yesterday that had (extremely slow) WiFi, I did a little research and came across some more information about Lewis D. Crenshaw, the UVa alum who co-authored the football song “Hike, Virginia” and put together the first modern UVa reunions in 1914.

I remain awed by his tireless energy as UVA Alumni Association Secretary, particularly by his work as the director of the University’s European Bureau during World War I. But I hadn’t fully appreciated his student involvement. In a career that included a law degree, he was at one time or another a member of Delta Tau Delta, Phi Delta Phi, Lambda Pi, the O.W.L., P.K., the Raven Society, vice-president of the Arcadians, on the board of the Athletic Association, and King of the Hot Feet.

If that last one doesn’t resonate with you, the Hot Feet were the predecessor group of the University’s IMP Society, given to elaborate rituals and a certain degree of hooliganism. According to University historian Virginius Dabney, they were apparently disbanded after a 1911 prank:

One of their more raucous nighttime performances consisted of removing the stuffed animals, snakes, and other varmints from the Cabell Hall basement, where they were stored, and stationing them behind the professors’ classroom desks and in front of their residences on the Lawn. This assemblage, which included a kangaroo, a tiger, an ostrich, a moose, boa constrictor, threetoed emu, and other animals, fowls, and reptiles, greeted the dumbfounded citizenry on Easter Sunday morning. On top of this, some well-lubricated Hot Feet bulled their way into a student’s room, roughed him up, and carried off a beer stein.

But at the time of Crenshaw’s Kingship, the Hot Feet were known mostly for their elaborate public coronations, costumes, and their public singing. Bringing it back to the Glee Club, the tune of their “Hot Feet Song” is the tune to the football song “Hike, Virginia”—unsurprising, given that both Crenshaw and his co-author Charles S. McVeigh were Hot Feet!

I close with an image of Crenshaw in full “King of the Hot Feet” regalia, presumably dating from long after his Kingship. I will say this: whatever the mischief that the Hot Feet got into, it looks like they had a hell of a lot of fun.

lewisDabneyCrenshaw_HotFeet

Random 5: Pre-RSA edition

I’ll be traveling next week to the big security industry trade show, but hope still to manage some blogging. It should be … interesting. There’s some very cool stuff coming up from us, and always a few new things to see from competitors and hear about from the market. But in the meantime, there’s Random 5!

  1. Reckoner (Piano/Strings Stem) – Radiohead (Reckoner (Instrument Stems) – EP). Radiohead, experimenting with distribution and business models around the time of the In Rainbows album, released five separate instrument stem tracks for their song Reckoner. The tracks conserve whitespace and so are not for casual listening—this track opens with 1:22 of silence—but repay close inspection. With this stem you can hear how the piano provides a chord progression which is then picked up by the strings, for a net effect that wouldn’t be out of place in a soundtrack.
  2. Anecdotes – Joanna Newsom (Divers). I like this track just fine, but I preferred Joanna Newsom before her edges were sanded off.
  3. Toyland – Anita Ellis (Vintage Christmas). Man, remember when pop songs had serious orchestration with artistic interest and value? Yeah, me either.
  4. For What It’s Worth – Talk Talk (The Very Best Of). This anthology isn’t the “very best of” Talk Talk—that’s their album Laughing Stock—but has some otherwise interesting tracks, such as this non-album track. Built with the same instrumental essentials as any mid-80s track (the bass treatment could be heard on lots of 80s pop), the minimal slow burn of the two-chord vamp on which the song is built makes it stronger—and stranger—than many of its contemporaries. And then there’s…
  5. The Sea Incertain – Gastr Del Sol (Upgrade & Afterlife). David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke doing what they do best: a piano exploring a set of changes on a simple melody is gradually pushed to the background by electronic whistling sounds, a straining clarinet, and feedback. Essential listening.

Writing is hard

It’s hard to write something every day.

That should be a self evident statement, but based on my track record fifteen years ago, I blithely assumed it would be easy to get back on the horse after a multi-year hiatus. It’s not.

One of the things I used to be able to do was to keep a thread always running in my mind, thinking about the next thing I was going to write about. The problem is that it’s hard to avoid writing the same stuff over and over again—or worse, to avoid writing about stuff you don’t want to write about. For me, right now, that includes the 2016 presidential race, which I find appalling, and the Apple/FBI argument, which I find appalling for different reasons.

It might be time to start a new topic on this blog so I don’t continue spinning my wheels on the same old ones. Cocktails, maybe. Or existentialism.

The first Glee Club reunion

Virginia Glee Club presidents at the 140th anniversary alumni sing (2011) — photo courtesy Jeff Slutzky
Virginia Glee Club presidents at the 140th anniversary alumni sing (2011) — photo courtesy Jeff Slutzky

We’re in the run-up to the Virginia Glee Club 145th Anniversary Reunion, and that has me thinking about the history of Glee Club reunions.

The earliest record of Glee Club involvement in a reunion activity predates both the Glee Club as a well-established organization and formal reunions at the University of Virginia. In an article published in the Virginia University Magazine in October 1882 describing the final exercises of the previous June, this description occurs:

In the afternoon came the Alumni dinner whereat many of the young initiates forgot themselves and waxed uproarious–especially to be noticed was a sober minded one who insisted on drinking to the health of the “Glee Club” after every song in which performances his stentorian lungs did effective service.

So before there were Glee Club reunions, there were alumni at University functions who were involved with the Glee Club.

The next reunion was likely the 50th Anniversary concert in 1936. I say “likely” because we don’t have a record of an actual reunion event, but we do have evidence that there was going to be, thanks to the listing of the Glee Club’s Alumni Advisory Board in the 1935 Annual Concert program.

After that the record is murky. The next one for which we have a record is the 125th Anniversary in 1996 (in between these two we changed the founding date from 1886 to 1871 based on better evidence). This established the format for future reunions: a Glee Club performance, an alumni sing, a banquet.

Regular five year reunions began in 2006 with the establishment of the Virginia Glee Club Alumni and Friends Association and the 135th anniversary. Reunions have followed at five year intervals since then. If you haven’t done so, it’s fun to check out the photos, video, and audio from the 140th.

New music Tuesday: Marissa Nadler, Herbie Hancock compilation

I will forever be wired to seek out new music on Tuesdays, the recent shift to Friday releases be damned. Today I came across a few new goodies:

“In the evening, by the moonlight”

1938-virginiaspectator-1
Cover to the April 1938 issue of the Virginia Spectator

I had a lucky eBay find last week: a copy of the April 1938 issue of the Virginia Spectator, the successor to the University of Virginia Magazine and the original University of Virginia literary mag. These magazines aren’t especially valuable, though they only turn up infrequently. What made this one stand out was an article by a Virginia Glee Club member, Daniel Jenkins, about the state of song at the University.

Jenkins is an alum I’ve known about for some time. When I was an undergrad, he sent us a letter about his experience as a Glee Club member in the 1930s. I subsequently discovered that he had been a member of the Tin Can Quartet (which I wrote about a while ago) He is, I believe, still with us and still supporting the Glee Club’s endeavors, though I don’t know much about his whereabouts.

This article provides one of the earliest existing descriptions of Glee Club alumni singing:

On Saturday nights of Finals, however, a minor miracle took place. Gathered in and around a certain room on East Lawn were a goodly number of dark conspirators; six members of the class of 1912 had slipped away from their comrades, bearing with them a huge Mason jar containing a mint julep, and were on their way to join the group lurking in the shadows of East Lawn. Three members of the Tin Can Quartet, a dozen members of the Glee Club, past and present, and an odd assortment of dates waited expectantly as the six alumni approached. And then, a short five minutes later—ah, shades of the mighty Caruso!—it had been a long year—the soft, harmonious tones of “Sweet Adeline” once again rolled up and down the Lawn. The same moon shimmered through the trees and the same purple shadows mingled with the ghostly figures that stood grouped beneath a stately oak. A prominent and dignified New York attorney gazed up at the stars and hit notes of which he had never before believed himself capable. A notorious “big business man” drowned the sorrows of a troubled world in his Mason jar and gazed down at the green sod beneath his feet, rumbling a potent bass that seemed to mingle with the very roots of the mighty oak which towered above him.

For three hours the singing continued. They sang every song that ever graced a barbershop of old. Juleps were plentiful and so were first tenors—happy coincidence. But finally, at four o’clock in the morning, and when voices were so hoarse that anything above a whisper was an effort, the small crowd began to break up. The six alumni, their eyes tired but shining, stumbled wearily across the Lawn, speaking in reverent tones of the song-fests that used to be so common and now are so rare. The others, lingering for a brief moment over the dregs, said good-night and went their separate ways. The Lawn was once again cloaked in silence.

I was unsurprised, but a little disappointed, to find that even this memory carried the taint of the South’s original sin, though, with the inclusion of the minstrel show song “In the Evening, By the Moonlight.” Again, a reminder that the Glee Club was like every Southern cultural institution and carried the seeds of slavery’s past with it into the twentieth century.

But the article gives me hope, too, that the power of song can still bridge generations and tap deeper reserves of humanity in the singer and the listener. It’s a timely reminder, given the Glee Club’s upcoming 145th Reunion celebration in April. I hope the juleps are plentiful then too.

Random 5: family travel edition

Flying back today, so trying to put the Random 5 together using the WordPress app on my phone. The miracles of modern technology!

  1. “For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her” – Paul Desmond (Bridge Over Troubled Water). A surprising album of all jazz covers of Simon and Garfunkel songs by Dave Brubeck’s longtime saxophonist. The results are a little uneven—no one needed that jazz cover of “El Condor Pasa”—but this track is lovely, with some fat Rhodes piano by Herbie Hancock (!) and a full orchestration. 
  2. “Weightless” – Brian Eno (Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks). One of my favorite tracks from this album, framing Eno’s atmospheric synths and textures with Daniel Lanois’s subtle slide guitar. 
  3. “El Niño: Pues Mi Dios Ha Nacido a Penar” – Deutsches Symphonieorchester Berlin, Kent Nagano (John Adams: El Niño). I will forever be sorry that I couldn’t sing this with the BSO a few years ago. This movement features a sublime solo from the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and some typically unsettled choral writing from Adams.
  4. “Two Sacred Songs Opus 30: I. Zlożę Na Pańskim Stole” – Ronan Collett, Stephen De Pledge & Chamber Domaine (Górecki: Life Journey). A baritone lied in Polish, in glacial time, accompanied by the barest outlines of a piano accompaniment. I considered using this for an audition piece once, and still might. I’d like a better translation before I do though, to better sell whatever takes the baritone into the higher register for two phrases near the end. 
  5. “My Secret Weapon” – Mark Mothersbaugh (The Lego Movie: Original Soundtrack). Great incidental music for a pivotal moment in the film, works surprisingly well against the Górecki and the Eno.

Magic Kingdom day 2: Adventure and Frontier

Disney World promenade

We spent most of our first day in Magic Kingdom yesterday around Main Street, Fantasyland and Tomorrowland (with a brief detour into the outskirts of Liberty Square for some funnel cake). But with a late afternoon case of the sore feet and aggravated from one more too-scary roller coaster (yes, my 5 year old son is officially Too Little for roller coasters if he can even be scared by the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train), we hopped on the train and rode it all the way to Frontierland.

It was like being dropped off in a different century. The whole aesthetic of Frontierland seems tied to the same decade that brought us the Berenstain Bears — a nuclear family where the mama wears a bonnet and dad wears overalls and they live in a wood paneled country cabin style tree house. Which is to say, I walked through and instantly felt as though I were back in 1981 during my first visit to the Magic Kingdom. I even had a powerful flash of déjà vu walking from Frontierland into Adventureland. I knew that stretch of Old West street. I had walked it. I had gone to the Country Bears Jamboree in it.

The fact that going around the corner brought you to Aladdin’s Magic Carpet (and a character meet and greet with Jasmine) didn’t dislodge my memories—these attractions sit cheek by jowl next to the Enchanted Tiki Room and still are around the corner from the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse. If Tomorrowland has received a big grafting of 21st century product, Tomorrowland and Adventureland felt something like 90% pristine.

Which is interesting to me. I think the original theory of these two lands was that they would be the “boy” lands while Fantasyland and Main Street would be the “girl” lands. But today’s kids have never heard the theme song to “Davy Crockett” (which was, to my surprise, playing on the bus to the park yesterday morning). There are no free range outdoorsman or cowboy kids any more. So what explains the enduring power of these attractions?

I guess the difference between Tomorrowland and Frontierland is that, when it was built, we still thought that there was more Tomorrow to be discovered. But the frontier celebrated by Frontierland had been largely explored a hundred years before Disney got to it. Frontierland was nostalgia from the beginning, grown into archetype, and now all but into myth.

The future was yesterday


This is my second trip to Walt Disney World. The first was in 1981. Back then my dad and I went on the then new Space Mountain—my sister tried it only to bail out at the last minute. The next day, we went to Cape Canaveral and watched the first launch of the shuttle Columbia. 

Now it’s 2016. This time I’m the Dad and it’s my daughter (and the rest of my family) who opted out of Space Mountain. And the space shuttles haven’t flown for years. Columbia itself was destroyed in 2003.

Walking through Space Mountain, the time seems even more out of joint. FastPass is a brilliant innovation: there are no lines, provided you go when you’re told and don’t mind planning months in advance. Disney discriminates in favor of the intentional and the planful—no place for the ADD-afflicted in this kingdom! Once through it mostly seems dark, and even the refreshed interior seems dated. And either I remember more lights inside the actual coaster or I’ve gone blind.

Tomorrowland, the part of Disney World that Space Mountain anchors, doesn’t look much like tomorrow any more. Big parts of it consume a pre-mid century aesthetic of Flash Gordon and Googie California gas stations. But this future never came to be. And the bits that have started to come in around the edges—Monsters Inc?—don’t seem like a future at all.

I don’t know what our future looks like but I don’t think it’s space travel. But when I was a kid that’s all I thought about. What will my kids imagine for their future?

Missed-a-day-cause-I-was-in-Magic-Kingdom blogging

Yesterday was our first day in the Magic Kingdom’s parks, and of course I didn’t blog.

One of the things this exercise in daily blogging has taught me is the importance of carving out time to write, which is impossible when sharing a room with three other humans, two under the age of 10. So I’m writing this while the kids bounce off the walls.

We learned some important things yesterday at Animal Kingdom:

  1. Timely breakfast is important for everyone’s happiness.
  2. The five year old was not ready for Expedition: Everest or for the time traveling Dinosaur ride.
  3. Neither was his nine year old sister. Or his mom.
  4. In fact, I’m probably the only scary ride aficionado in the family.
  5. Even a nine year old gets tired of chicken nuggets. That doesn’t make her want to try new foods though.
  6. It’s nothing short of a miracle to find good beer in a big amusement park. Thank you, Victory Golden Monkey.

It’ll be interesting to see what today brings.

Travel day

Don’t know that I’ll get much blogging done today, as we are flying far away from the frozen Northeast for a few days at the Magic Kingdom. So far I’ve learned that there are four magic things to help kids wait for a plane:

  1. The promise of lunch
  2. Reading a story, preferably some Roald Dahl (we’re working our way through The B.F.G. at the moment)
  3. Chocolate 
  4. iPads with headphones

More later.