Howdy Gustl
>Hallo Jesse,
>
>Hey dere! So how's by you, eh? Well, I know a fellow named Mark who
>used to live in Manchester, Michigan.
>
>Wednesday, 12 April, 2006, 18:00:11, you wrote:
>
>mm> Hi Gustl, Mike,
>mm> No one ever answers my posts (except Keith, our hero), so I can
>mm> blithely write on this delightfully off-topic topic.
>
>...snip...
>
>mm> Balance of idealism and practicality indeed. But what kid is
>mm> practical? Bringing up the question of when is it that human
>mm> beings become 1) aware of their mortaility 2) humbled by it 3)
>mm> able to get anybody to listen to them. I mean this not
>mm> morphologically, but as a maturity thing.
>
>mm> Kids today! So accountable! Like THEY have to fix everything.
>mm> While listening to the Beatles!!! (I have not criticized my
>mm> children on this, incidentally, they are still impressed that I
>mm> know all the words.)
>
>Well, I just arrived home and downloaded my mail and see that Keith
>has already answered you. The only things I have to add are that it
>is the balance which is of primary importance and I like Frank Sinatra
>as well as Frank Zappa.
I can't say I like Frank Sinatra. I do like some of his songs though,
and I enjoyed some of his movies. It's the Frank Sinatra ethos I
meant really, but I'm sure you got that.
We discussed this before, eh, you and me, or something similar. Now I
have to add something I wrote underneath, sorry, can't help it.
Please see below.
>Well, I guess I should add that if you want
>to hear the best album ever recorded, IMNSHO, try and find Willis Alan
>Ramsey. He only made one album and it had his name. Every song on
>the thing is a winner.
Thankyou!
>My taste in music is eclectic in the extreme.
And mine.
>We once had to write an essay on our favorite type of music and it
>wouldn't have taken me an essay to tell that...good music. You know
>it when you hear it even if you don't understand the language the
>words are in or recognize the instruments which are being played. ;o)
Amongst the things it's not is the pre-digested pap that's packaged
for mass consumption and marketed by the trends industry so the
merchandising gets leveraged too and so on. There can be exceptions,
they do say the most beautiful lotus grows in the dirtiest mud, which
may well be true for a lotus but most things like good soil, and that
ain't it. Thorny ground.
>... even if you don't understand the language the
>words are in or recognize the instruments which are being played. ;o)
Strange you should say that, I want to send you some music that's
like that. Two different kinds. But I have to get hold of some gear
first, I'm short of some hardware. Midori turns out to be short of
the same hardware, we'll do it soon.
Regards
Keith
>Hope you get some other answers brother. I can't imagine Keith being
>the only one to answer any post on this list. hahaha
>
>Happy Happy,
>
>Gustl
>--
Dixie
Hong Kong, 1995
Dixie is the Cantonese word for "taxi", but it's not something you
expect to hear in one. But this one was different -- not dixie
though, Al Jolson. Al Jolson? In a Hong Kong taxi? Not a radio
phone-in, not a chat show, not Canto-pop, but Al Jolson?
"Toot-toot-tootsie goodbye-yiii..."
Must be a reality slip -- it's thin stuff, reality, it's hardly there
at all really, and it's hardly surprising if it slips sometimes. It's
an odd feeling, sort of like a headache in the belly, but without the
ache, and not in the belly -- you find yourself looking at the whole
thing with deep suspicion, and then you realise you're in a dream, so
it's okay if the apples are made of cheese and the restaurant just
turned into a swimming pool and so on, only this time you realise
you're not in a dream. A bit like the Chinese poet who dreamt he was
a butterfly, and when he woke up he couldn't decide whether he was a
man dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a
man, only I don't think butterflies dream, it would be superfluous.
"Toot-toot-tootsie don't cry-yiii..." Things shimmered slightly like
a hologram in an SF movie, then got a grip again. The radio wasn't
jammed on the wrong channel, the music was coming from a tape, and
the driver was bobbing his head in time, and sort of bobbing the cab
through the traffic, also in time.
"If you don't get a letter then you'll know I'm in jail..." That was
a good line, I'd forgotten that one. I'd forgotten the song too. I'd
even forgotten Al Jolson. And I didn't remember liking his singing
much, but that's what I was doing now in this taxi. The song ended.
"What's the music?" I asked.
"Al Jolson," said the driver. "Good-ah?"
"Yes. You like the old music?"
"Yes, modern music, it doesn't, it hasn't got ... I don't like it. I
like this music." The tape had moved on to orchestral evergreens.
"Nice tunes," I said. They are too, that's why they're evergreens,
even if they aren't Frank Zappa or Beethoven or even Chuck Berry. I
sometimes leave the radio on when I'm working at home, though I don't
hear much of it, and I often work late at night, when Ray Cordeiro
plays evergreens on Radio 3, and then classical music. "Do you listen
to Ray Cordeiro?" I asked.
"Oh yes, Uncle Ray, Pure Nostalgia, Radio 3, 97.9 Megahertz, midnight
to 2 am. That's why I like working late at night, driving my taxi."
"I'm in the mood for love," a 'fifties crooner sang with lush
'fifties orchestral backing. The taxi smooched its way past a couple
of minibuses.
Uncle Ray plays Doris Day, Frank Sinatra, Matt Munro, Ella
Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Johnny Mathis, Nat King Cole, Billie
Holiday, Rosemary Cloony, Bing Crosby and so on.
"Ma, he's making eyes at me!" squealed an extremely cheerful
'thirties gal, followed by Al Jolson again. This is the music they
used to play when I was a child in the early 'fifties, but even then
Al Jolson was "old". In 1927 he starred in The Jazz Singer, the first
movie with a soundtrack. He died in 1950. When they made The Jazz
Singer my mother was whatever it was they had in those days instead
of teenagers, which is what seems to matter when it comes to
nostalgia. She played the piano, and when I was a kid the house was
often filled with music from those times, tunes like Stardust, as
well as Debussy or Greig. When she was about 65 she got into ragtime,
and when she was 86 she still liked playing old Scott Joplin songs.
She was very syncopated, even though she wasn't sure quite what
century it was anymore.
In the cab, someone was singing "It's still the same old story, a
fight for love or glory, a case of do or die..." I can listen to it,
but I wouldn't go out of my way for it -- I don't own any music like
that. I hark from the next era: by the time I was a teenager they'd
invented both teenagers and rock 'n' roll, and also pop music. A lot
of it was great, and a lot of it was terrible crud -- I really don't
like some of the stuff I'm supposed to be nostalgic about. In fact I
don't like nostalgia either -- it tends to add a rosy glow that
wasn't there at the time. I prefer memories. But I had to admit this
was a mellow taxi ride.
"I left my heart, in San-Fran-cis-co," sang Billie Holiday. Frank
Zappa also did that one, or rather he did it in, musical murder live
onstage as only Frank Zappa could commit it. But Billie Holiday
resurrected it for me, singing the blues like only Lady Day could
sing them, and it sounded great. The driver chatted on, I chatted
back. He eyed me in the rearview mirror: "I think you're about 50
years old, right?"
"Yes," I answered -- he'd figured it out from what I'd said about
music. "And you?"
"I'm 61. I've been collecting music for a long time, but it's hard to
buy the old music. I was lucky to find Al Jolson. I've been looking
for the Black and White Minstrels for years, and I'm still looking."
Al Jolson suddenly came back into focus: he used to wear a top hat
and tails and white gloves, and painted his white face black,
pantomiming an old-time Negro minstrel singer like the one on the
tube of Darlie toothpaste (which used to be called "Darkie"). When I
was five or six, this seemed very weird to me. My white South African
parents gave me some sort of explanation, which I've forgotten,
excepting that it didn't make any sense. They weren't much good on
why the boy was really a girl and the girl was a boy in the Christmas
pantomimes either. I pictured a local man brushing his teeth with
Darlie toothpaste before going onstage to play the woman lead in a
Cantonese opera.
"I can't give you anything but love, ba-by," grated Satchmo. I
suggested a couple of shops that might stock the Black and White
Minstrels (the same ones that stock Frank Zappa), and one of them he
didn't know. "Thankyou," he said. "I'll go there tomorrow." We
arrived, I paid and alighted. What a nice old guy. I hope he didn't
end up with Frank Zappa instead.
A few days later I got into a taxi that was awash with Country &
Western songs, driven by a very relaxed Chinese cowboy, cruising Wan
Chai with a box of C&W tapes. He asked me if I was a gei je, a
reporter. It was the first thing he said as we set off.
"How did you know that?" I asked. I don't look like a reporter -- I
mean, reporters don't look like anything in particular, do they? He
just shrugged, gave me a slow smile in the mirror and asked where I
came from and how long I'd been here, and did I have a wife and
family? No, did he have a wife and family? No -- he'd had two wives,
divorced twice, wah. No, no children. And me? The same, more or less.
Were they Westerners, my wives? Yes, Westerners.
"Very expensive, a Western wife," he said. I laughed -- actually,
they hadn't been, and they'd have had a vivid response to such a view.
"Very expensive, a Hong Kong wife," I said. "Are you looking for another wife?"
"Maybe." He laughed: "Maybe not!"
I couldn't agree more.
The first time I came to Hong Kong, 20 years ago, a taxi driver asked
me the same question. We'd been discussing all sorts of things and
had solved half the world's problems already, and he said: "Are you a
newspaper reporter?"
"How did you know that?"
"Newspaper reporters know everything -- but they don't know how to
make money," he laughed.
"Taxi drivers also know everything, and they also don't know how to
make money," I replied. I'm not sure why, but we both found this
intensely funny.
Just before Lunar New Year I caught yet another musical taxi. This
driver wasn't chatty -- without actually saying so, he very politely
gave me to know that although I was in the back seat I should belt up
anyway, because he was listening to a violin concerto. It was one I
didn't know.
"Nice!" I ventured to say.
"Yes!" he agreed.
So we listened as we rode. The concerto turned out to have a Chinese
melody. Ten minutes of it and we arrived, though I could easily have
listened to more. The driver wrote down the name of the piece in my
notebook, in good, clear Chinese characters.
"Butterfly Lovers," he said, pointing out the characters. "Chinese
violin concerto." Composed by Chen Gang and He Zhan Hao, as it turns
out, and, unlike Al Jolson and Frank Zappa, it's easy to buy. It
doesn't say if they were dreaming or not.
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