January 2024 - Page 6 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

#1 hits of 1904

celebrating the anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase

The #1 hits of 1904 include a few songs you know. You’re older than you look.

Sweet Adeline (You’re the Flower of My Heart) – Haydn Quartet (Victor), ten weeks at #1. The Crew-Cuts covered this in 1959. I have heard Sweet Adeline groups (female barbershop quartets) sing this song. I checked the Social Security database. Adeline was Top 1000 from 1900 to 1952. It fell off the list until 1999. In 2022, it was #92. Adaline (#242) and Adelina (#401) also ranked.

Meet Me In St. Louis, Louis– Billy Murray (Edison), nine weeks at #1. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition in that year was described as “the most lavish fair of the era.” Louis was a Top 30 name between 1900 and 1927, in the Top 100 through 1959, and is still #246 in 2022; Luis is currently #125.

Bedelia – Haydn Quartet. I couldn’t find a particularly clean copy. (Victor), Seven weeks at #1. I checked the Social Security database. Bedelia has never been in the top 1000 names since 1900.

Navajo – Billy Murray (Columbia), five weeks at #1. A piece of music of its time.

Silver Threads Among The Gold – Richard Jose (Victor), four weeks at #1

Blue Bell – Byron Harlan and Frank Stanley (Edison), four weeks at #1

You’re The Flower Of My Heart, Sweet Adeline – Columbia Male Quartet (Columbia), three weeks at #1

Bedelia – Billy Murray (Edison), three weeks at #1

Alexander– Billy Murray (Edison), three weeks at #1. A “comedy record” because Murray is presumably singing from the female POV? Alexander has been a Top 250 name since 1900, #4 in 2009, and #17 in 2022.

Blue Bell – Haydn Quartet (Victor), three weeks at #1

A couple more

All Aboard for Dreamland– Byron Harlan (Edison), two weeks at #1. This is about the Coney Island amusement park. I had a difficult time finding a decent recording.

Toyland – Corrine Morgan and Haydn Quartet (Victor), two weeks at #1

Adeline, Louis, Bedelia, and Navajo also reached the top 3 by other artists.

One song that my high school Glee club performed was a version of The Woodchuck Song. It was sung by Bob Roberts (Edison) and went to #3.

My favorite 1904 title is Under the Anhauser Bush, a comedy record by Arthur Collins and Bryan Harlan (Edison), which reached #2. The tune was used in the movie Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), starring Judy Garland, as was Louis, sung by Judy.

Boxing Day 2023

my ever-present past

Boxing Day 2023 was intriguing.

The doorbell rang around 7:30 a.m. It was a guy from the City of Albany’s Department of General Services. He and his colleagues would trim the branches from the trees in the neighborhood. A branch of our neighbor’s tree was leaning heavily on the power lines in front of our house.

Were any of the cars on your side of the street ours? No, our car was across the street. Even though I’m car blind – I don’t recognize vehicles well – I could identify our next-door neighbor’s from an item he placed in front of the car so people were less likely to run into it while parking.

They spent over an hour trimming one tree. It had a lot of problematic branches, and they had to cut them into smaller parts. Then they put those branches in in the mulcher.

I suspect they picked that week to do our street because there is an elementary school on the block, and many teachers park on the street. Too many people grumble about government employees, but I was quite pleased with these.

Book review intro

I stopped at the bank to get cash. I had to wait because a bank employee showed a young woman how to use the ATM.

Then, I took the bus to the Albany Public Library’s Washington Avenue branch to meet the author, Michael Sinclair. He has written a series of 1920s mysteries centered in Albany or Schenectady, NY.

Interestingly, his presentation was much more about Albany’s history, complete with many photos, and less about the books.

My past converges

After the talk, I talked to a reference librarian who’s often at the desk when I’m there on Tuesday afternoons. Michael Sinclair thanked her for some technical assistance, mentioned that he had graduated from UAlbany’s library school in 2003 and that the APL librarian had attended a decade earlier.

I asked her, “When did you graduate?” “1992.” I graduated in 1992. She asked who I knew from there then. I mentioned two future NY SBDC colleagues and my ex-wife. “She was married to this guy who was in the program.” I shook my head and said, “That was ME!”

Okay, so that was weird. Then she said, “And you used to go out with” this woman I dated off-and-on from 1978 to 1983. How did she know THAT? She used to work for said girlfriend at her office at UAlbany, and I would go there occasionally. So the librarian and I used to talk 40 years ago! She said I had a big ‘fro at the time; I didn’t think so, but it was an occasionally scruffy mess.

Altercation

As I’m standing at the reference desk, we hear one person yelling at another. And it got weird. I won’t talk much about it here because no great harm occurred, though it was unsettling to the library staff and me. Oh, and I was wearing a Santa hat at the time. The police arrived after one of the two had departed.

I went home, and then my wife and I went to the movies, which I wrote about separately.

How was YOUR Boxing Day 2023? Mine didn’t involve boxing, but it came close.

The random 2023 post

Nerdfighters

This is the random 2023 post. I randomly pick the blog post date for each month, and then, within that post, randomly select a sentence. I’m sure I purloined the idea from near twin Gordon.

A serious blogger like Kelly would pour through his output and highlight his favorite work from last year. That is a great idea, but that would involve actual work.

January: “Tell everyone about how #nylibraries have been important to your communities on social media!” Oops – I got caught advocating for libraries again!

February: “I explained this phenomenon here.” The “here” is a 2021 blog post about why sometimes people call me George; it has something to do with common consonants. This was a Sunday Stealing post.

March: “He wrote in a New York Times Magazine piece about catching a girl who was screaming.” The “he” was writer Armin Brott talking about how men’s involvement in parenting is often discouraged.

April: “If you know the history of the Census, you may realize that the current decennial census asks very few questions.” I was in full data geek mode.

May: “’Am I selfless, ever trusting in my supposed maternal instinct, and willing to fully sacrifice without complaining?'” Katy Huie Harrison, Ph.D. writes about the idealized mother. Her answer was, “Hell no!” But she adds, “And I think I’m a great mom.” This was my Mother’s Day post.

June: “Visit another church congregation for a shared picnic.” My plans for a very busy June. It was a lovely picnic, BTW. A Sunday Stealing.

Side 2

July: “My daughter started watching RuPaul’s Drag Race in the Best Reality Competition area, and I saw a few episodes.” I used to watch so much more TV in the 20th Century.

August: “It was written by Adrian Tomine, who also adapted the screenplay.” My review of the movie Shortcomings, which my wife liked far more than I did.

September: “I noted here that my sister Marcia and I used to play The Man from U.N.C.L.E. together.” A linkage post mentioned the passing of actor David McCallum.

October: “Answers from some Nerdfighters: ‘The Anthropocene Reviewed attempts to capture what it means to be human.'” My attempt to review the John Green book.

November: “I began to doubt my cognitive abilities.” The wallet is REALLY gone this time. What a PITA.

December: “I won’t do this for 1954 because I was born in 1953.” Celebrating the folks who are roughly nine months younger than I.

And the photo was randomly chosen from the photos used on this blog.

Movie review: The Color Purple (2023)

Fantasia Barrino’s first film

My wife and I saw the remake of the movie The Color Purple on December 26. It opened on Christmas Day and is likely the earliest I’ve ever seen a film in its theatrical run.

Two things ran through my head afterward. While I had seen the original 1985 version in the cinema – nominated for 11 Oscars and winning exactly none – a factoid I did not need to look up – I have a difficult time recalling more than a feeling of mostly despair. The director of that film, Steven Spielberg, is an executive producer of the new one.

I get what Taraji P. Henson said about the earlier take. “’The first movie missed culturally. We don’t wallow in the muck. We don’t stay stuck in our traumas. We laugh, we sing, we go to church, we dance, we celebrate, we fight for joy, we find joy, we keep it. That’s all we have.’”

Black joy doesn’t seem to dominate the media narrative. When I watched Making Black Grapevine, as I described here, I realized how much it’s often missing.

Promotion

Conversely, the movie was so hyped I was nervous. A star of the film appeared every day on CBS Mornings the week before the film opened, plus Oprah Winfrey, an executive producer of this iteration and a star of the 1985 take. My wife assumed it was a Paramount film (CBS is a Paramount Global company.) But no.

I assume it was because Gayle King, the longest-tenured of the hosts, is BFF with Oprah. To be sure, I got some insights. Henson was nervous about singing in the film, and Fantasia Barrino, who was in the Broadway musical in 2007, was worried about acting in her first film. I never saw the musical.

Wikipedia: “BroadwayWorld revealed that the film will not be a direct copy-and-paste adaptation of the stage musical, with elements from the novel and the 1985 film also being featured, including ‘Miss Celie’s Blues (Sister),’ the song sung by the character of Shug Avery in the 1985 film. 13 songs from the musical were cut from the film… while a song cut from the stage production, titled ‘She Be Mine,’ was reinstated for this film.”

Ah, the film

We liked the movie. It looks good, and most of the songs were compelling. The balance of music to narrative seemed reasonable. The acting and singing by Barrino as Celie, Henson as Shug Avery, and Danielle Brooks as Sofia were fine. The rest of the cast was strong, including Corey Hawkins, H.E.R., Halle Bailey, and David Alan Grier. Colman Domingo, who stars as the heroic pacifist Bayard Rustin in the Netflix film Rustin, is the brutal Albert “Mister” Johnson here.

The reviews were 87% positive with the critics and 95% in Rotten Tomatoes. One of the negative reviews was from Lisa Johnson Mandell of AtHomeInHollywood.com. “Just in time for Christmas – a jaunty movie musical about incest, rape and abuse. The musical numbers are gorgeous, but confusing and tone-deaf. They trivialize the gravity of truly unconscionable crimes and the people who commit them.”

This is an interesting concern. If the 1985 film was too dour, is the 2023 reimagining too… celebratory? As a couple of critics opined, is the 1982 book by Alice Walker unfilmable?

Or is the power of forgiveness for even these atrocities stronger than despair? I saw an interview on CBS News an interview of an Israeli man whose parents were murdered on October 7 who was seeking peace, not vengeance. The capacity for grace cannot be overestimated. So, I’m willing to accept the “happy ending” here.

a valuable life lesson learned in 2023

How does a weary world rejoice?

One more question:

Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2023:

Repeating what I’ve said before, The trouble with normal is it always gets worse. After the UNLV shooting, in which three people died, an NBC reporter interviewed a witness. The reporter said, “Incredibly,” the witness was also present at the 2017 Vegas shooting at which five dozen were killed and hundreds wounded. There was nothing “incredible” about it. It’s just guns in America.

Someone fired a shot around a Jewish temple in Albany, NY, on December 7, the first night of Hanukkah, which led the NBC Nightly News. No one was hurt, and the shooter was quickly apprehended. But the Israel/Hamas/Palestinian war has stirred long-simmering anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian bigotry, which we’ve seen everywhere from college campus to the streets of bucolic Burlington, VT, where three Palestinian college kids were staying because it was perceived as safer than being in the occupied West Bank. They were shot, and one likely will never walk again.

People can’t keep saying, “It can’t happen here.” I searched Wikipedia for Maine shootings, and I had choices: the one in 1993, the one in 2006, or the two in 2023.

orange

Then there’s the political turmoil. djt will be the Republican nominee, even if he’s convicted of one or more cases against him. The Atlantic is so terrified it had a whole issue dedicated to it.

Even if he’s not in office, his minions dominate the House, starting with the Speaker, Mike Johnson. And trumpism is baked in – book bans being the most on-the-nose example – and we can’t even count on the courts, certainly not SCOTUS, to stop it.

Add to this the ecological precipice we’re on and refugee crises worldwide, and you can call me Debbie Downer.

What is the remedy?

Still, I have hope because hopelessness is too hard. No hope means not getting out of bed in the morning. You do what you can. If that’s irrational, so be it.

How do I get there? And I see this as an ongoing process, not that I’ve arrived. For me, and it wasn’t initially a conscious decision, I’ve been embracing a series of sermons our pastors have been presenting during Advent and Christmastide collectively titled: “How does a weary world rejoice?”

“We acknowledge our weariness.” I’m very good at THAT. The first two sections of this post are precisely why I am weary. And I left a few things out.

“We find joy in connection.” Like many people, the real difficulty with COVID was the feeling of community. I’ve been embracing these opportunities. Thrice this year, I participated in trivia contests, as much for the collegiality as the competition; I’d only done trivia twice before, and one was in 2022. Participating in the Ironweed reading, a potluck, and a carol sing were other examples.

“We allow ourselves to be amazed.” My daughter interviewed me for a class project, which she says she’ll allow me to use in this blog early in 2024. I learned things about her but also about myself.

Awesome

“We make room.” Our friends gave us their tickets to the Albany Symphony Orchestra on December 10. I particularly loved watching the joy that one of the cellists was experiencing. At some moment in Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 4, which I was unfamiliar with, there is a dead silence. It was awesome and unexpected.

It was raining very hard that day. My wife pointed out that I mentioned the wonder of a brief silence twice. It was pouring out. I get JOY when we drive below an overpass, and the sound of the deluge is stilled for 1.5 seconds. This has been true for a very long time.

“We sing stories of hope.” On Christmas Eve 2020, my church service was online. The pastors were present, but few others. The music was provided by recordings of our choir singing from previous years. Watching me sing brought me to tears, and they were not happy tears but weeping of despair. I don’t take singing on Christmas Eve, Maundy, Easter Sunday, or even a regular weekly service for granted.

“We root ourselves in ritual.” I have Thursday choir rehearsal, Sunday service, and Tuesday book talk at the Washington Avenue branch of the Albany Public Library (moving, BTW, from noon to 2 p.m. this year). Many years ago, a friend complained when I refused to pass on choir rehearsal to do something else. Rehearsing means knowing the music better on Sunday and experiencing the choir gestalt.