Two Barenaked Ladies Slideshows about Mental Illness
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Two Barenaked Ladies Slideshows about Mental Illness

[Previously posted–in slightly different form–on my Unofficial: Barenaked Ladies Facebook fan page.]  I am a little hesitant about putting this up, partly because I am very aware that I have consciously skewed the more or less straightforward meaning of this absolutely breathtaking song. The vast majority of the time, I try to be true to what seems to be the songwriter’s intent, and I realize I am opening myself up to very justifiable criticism by creating a visual context that actually alters this meaning (I certainly have sometimes criticized movies for not being faithful to their source, although much less so these days than in the past). I have done this in other slideshows a few times (Warren Zevon’s “They Moved the Moon” and Loudon Wainwright III’s “Unhappy Anniversary” come to mind), but it’s really the exception rather than the rule. The other reason for my hesitancy really has to do with how I altered the meaning, essentially taking a love song (albeit one with some darkly evocative undercurrents) and making it into a song about mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder. Although I do not have this particular mental problem myself (yeah, I have others), I have known people who do, with the illness often manifesting in the late teens or early twenties. I hope the slideshow expresses empathy, if not always tact, and an understanding of the kind of pain and suffering that often seems to be beyond the victim’s control. I am certain I decided to take this approach in part because of last week’s “A Different Sort of Solitude” slideshow, which meant doing a little research about Steven and why he left BNL. He has said, apparently, he suffers from this condition, although I don’t know if that is a self-diagnosis or one made by a medical professional. Given my past experience with people who were bipolar, I suddenly began to see his leaving the group, this song, and especially the relationship between Steven and Ed, in a new light, and this slideshow is the first of the results of that.

 

This is a pretty direct followup to “What a Good Boy.” In fact, it makes explicit the idea I only implied in the earlier one, which is that you could interpret the song as being about Ed and Steven’s relationship. Ed has apparently said that he wrote the song below at least in part with Steven’s departure in mind, so I don’t think I am really bringing any thing to the song that isn’t there. Frankly, back when I first heard the song, which I immediately liked, I actually thought it was written from a parent to a child–it’s only very recently that I came to realize that it could be construed to be about relationships within the group. In some ways, if “What a Good Boy” gives you an inside perspective on being bipolar, “You Run Away” gives you an outside perspective, the perspective of those having to deal with the bipolar person. Having heard BNL’s new song, “Canada Dry” (its been officially released on YouTube now) which will be on their next album, I realize that it is a subject that continues to be on Ed’s mind (it’s also a fantastic song). I realize this is a sensitive subject for some BNL fans, with some people blaming one or the other of the parties involved, but I actually mean what I say at the slideshow’s end. All the best to all.

Two Donovan Slideshows about Children’s Rhymes
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Two Donovan Slideshows about Children’s Rhymes

I always loved Lewis Carroll’s books, and my family had a couple of beautiful illustrated versions of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass back when I was growing up. By the time I got through with them, I’m afraid, they looked considerably worse for wear. “Jabberwocky” has also become somewhat famous as an example of Victorian nonsense verse, which is actually a whole minor genre. The poem remains a wonderful example of the form, with a coherent story of coming of boy’s coming of age by means of the slaying of a mysterious yet horrible monster. Every boy needs to be called a “beamish boy” at least once in their lives. This is from Donovan’s HMS Donovan album, which is largely nursery rhymes and children’s poems set to music. The simple guitar pattern and swirling organ arrangement establish an air of mystery, while Donovan’s rather solemn delivery suggests what an earnest business this is for our unnamed hero. Hope you like it (to some extent, this slideshow was an excuse for me to explore Victorian book illustration).

This is the second of two slideshows inspired and accompanied by Donovan’s versions of nursery rhymes and children’s poems from his 1971 HMS Donovan album. I always rather liked this bedtime poem, in part because it was about getting to one of my favorite places: sleep. Donovan does set it to a a lovely melody, and it actually achieves a surprising narrative drivel. You’ll notice a number of illustrations by Maxfield Parrish (very noted in the 1920s), as well as more recent illustrations from children’s books, which I have intercut with photographs of fishing and fish, trying to suggest both the world of art and the art of the world. Hope you like it.

Two Elbow Music Videos: “Kindling” and “My Sad Captains”
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Two Elbow Music Videos: “Kindling” and “My Sad Captains”

Only the first of these is my slideshow, but I thought I would include the second as another wonderful example of a rather simple, low-cost but remarkably effective video, the kind this Manchester band often produces. (Cross posted at the Guy Garvey’s Finest Hour and Elbow FB group). Since this version of “Kindling” first appeared in my Facebook feed a couple of months ago (it originally appeared, without John Grant’s vocals) on their Little Fictions album last Spring), I’ve been entranced with it. The way it folds together memory, strong emotion, and its sudden, stunning rebirth are very affecting, while the restrained melody complements the way John and Guy’s voice interweave to absolutely stunning effect. Anyway, this is my fourth Elbow slideshow, my way of preparing myself for their shows next month at The Observatory and The Wiltern.  The video clips are from Shutterstock, and–yes–I paid for them. Hope you like it.

The second is the band’s offical video for “My Sad Captains,” from their Take Off and Landing of Everything album. It’s a lovely, poignant song, and the video really manages to encompass the song’s beautiful innocence, sadness, and acceptance, all in about four minutes. Other than the multiple cameras, it almost looks like a home movie, which actually contributes to its success, I think.

Warren Zevon: Two Slideshows
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Warren Zevon: Two Slideshows

Here’s one I finished at the beginning of the month. I’ve always liked the Transverse City album, in part because of its distinctly experimental vibe. Warren was trying lots of new things, and they worked a lot of the time. Where the title track and “They Moved the Moon” seemed to push musical boundaries, “Nobody’s in Love This Year” pushes lyrical ones in the way it uses financial metaphors to describe love relationships or–more accurately–their collapse. It certainly captures one of the darker and more prevalent aspects of the Reagan years–one that is still with us–but it does so with Warren’s characteristic wit, lyrical grace, and melodic beauty. Hope you like it.

A reader of my “Unofficial: Warren Zevon” fan page suggested I do this song about Warren and the RR Hall of Fame. It seemed like a good idea, and I think the slideshow turned out OK. The web address at the end is to 2017 petition on change.otg to induct Warren. This petition has apparently just been closed, as the nominating ballots for 2017 have just come out, and again Warren isn’t on it. Another indifferent year in heaven, I guess. So it goes.

Elbow’s “Lost Worker Bee”: An Unofficial Slideshow
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Elbow’s “Lost Worker Bee”: An Unofficial Slideshow

Here’s a slideshow I just did to “Lost Worker Bee.” I quite like the official video, which this in no way replaces, but I like how it turned out. It’s a bit more Elbow-focused, as well as a bit more bee-focused than the video, although I think it does a good job of suggesting the yearning and possible fulfillment that is at the song’s heart. While this could be seen as a followup to my “Build a Rocket Boys” and “Open Arms” slideshows of last summer. This is actually my way of my beginning to get ready for the band’s North American tour (I’ll see them twice next month!).

I thought I would post this, simply because it is a wonderful example of how you can do a lot with a little in a music video. It isn’t my video, but has gotten over five-and-a-half million views on YouTube. It helps to have a terrific song, of course, one that does a remarkable job of capturing that evanescent feeling of everything just falling into place.

 

Loudon Wainwright III’s “The Man Who Just Couldn’t Cry”: An Unofficial Slideshow
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Loudon Wainwright III’s “The Man Who Just Couldn’t Cry”: An Unofficial Slideshow

Previously posted on my Unofficial Loudon Wainwright III FB page.

‘ve liked the “Man Who Couldn’t Cry” since I first heard it on Loudon”s Attempted Mustache album. I still have a fairly clear memory of him performing it at the Roxy in Los Angeles on the T-Shirt album tour. At one time, I knew how to play it on guitar and could even sing all the verses, which was an exceptional achievement for me at the time (I could play or sing, but not both at once). This is actually the version from Loudon’s 2008 Recovery album, which I recently purchased. I must say, I usually prefer Loudon’s live versions of songs, but I was deeply impressed by this, which really gains something from the drums and orchestration. I’m still not wholly sure what the song is about, exactly, but it seems to have something to do with karmic justice. I did go for a few cheap jokes, but by and large I think it remains true to spirit of the song, except perhaps the end where I find what may well be an unjustified optimism (perhaps playing with the idea of “Recovery”). It was just to bleak to leave humanity and its home in the song’s last line. 

U Know Your Reichs (Nirvana Cover)
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U Know Your Reichs (Nirvana Cover)

Originally posted, in somewhat different form, on the The Daily Kos back in May, and on Facebook last Thursday. This seemed an appropriate followup to the last diary I posted, which also touches on the subject of Holocaust denial (actually, it’s better than this slideshow, so if you have to choose, you should watch the Eva Kor video below, which I had nothing to do with).

This is the first slideshow I made this year, probably around the end of April or the beginning of May. I’ve done about sixty since this one. I haven’t really pushed it, in part because I thought it really didn’t come across as well with the two versions of the songs I ended up having to use. Originally, it was set to the Nirvana’s “You Know Your Right” and Liza Minnelli’s “Heiraten” from Cabaret, but neither were available for use (often, you can use songs as long as you are willing to cede all monies generated from YouTube ads to the copyright holders–but sometimes this is forbidden). To replace the Liza Minnelli song, I have used Zarah Leander‘s “Adieu” (a Swedish singer who was a popular in Europe in the thirties). She was actually strongly anti-Nazi, and had a hit with “I skuggan av en stovel” (“In the shadow of the boot”) which was an anti-fascist song written by her husband.

If you noted the rather obvious pun in the title to this diary, you probably know where this is heading. Essentially, the slideshow was inspired by the confluence of two things: watching Andre Singer’s Night Will Fall, a powerful documentary incorporating many reels of long forgotten footage that British soldiers shot when they were liberating the concentration camps in the western part of Germany. As someone in the film says, the footage conveys the utter despair of people in the camps more powerfully than anything else I have seen (admittedly, I have not watched Shoah). Even the relatively inexperienced military cameramen who are interviewed—sixty years later—are still visibly traumatized by the experience of witnessing and recording such a spectacle.

Even more obviously, of course, the title refers to Nirvana’s last studio recording, “You Know You’re Right.” Recorded just a month before Kurt Cobain’s suicide by shotgun, I have always found it a powerful and memorable song, even if I didn’t always understand the lyrics. Recently, I have come to understand how perfectly Cobain’s song captured the thoughts and feelings of someone of verge of suicide. The guilt and shame, the overwhelming desire to escape (“I will crawl away from here”), to not hurt anyone else (“You won’t be afraid of fear”), an overpowering sense of inevitability (“I always knew it would come to this”), the utter mental agony (for a long time I thought he was saying, “Ay-ay-ay-ay”; what he is actually repeating is “Pai-ai-ai-ain”), along with rage (tinged by Cobain’s characteristic sarcasm) that invites everyone who ever called him a no talent loser to self-righteously pat themselves on the back at having gotten him so right (suicide also being an act characteristic of a “loser”), but also to pull back in sudden revulsion at their own self-congratulatory glee at another human being’s intolerable suffering. It’s so brilliant that it hurts, which could also be said of Singer’s film.

All apologies to Nirvana fans who may feel that my slideshow has fundamentally misinterpreted what was obviously a intensely personal song. I have taken the most intimate act imaginable—that of taking one’s own life—and re-contextualized it as a deeply impersonal one: genocide (for how could we do such terrible things to our fellow human beings if we truly saw them as people with their own hopes, dreams, loves, and fears?). I realize, of course, that it is always deeply personal to the victims of genocide, as well as to their family, relations, and friends. For copyright reasons, I have used a cover version of the song by Grubby Paws (the NC in the title means “Nirvana Cover”). It’s actually an excellent cover, but still not quite as powerful as the original version.

Donovan: Two Evocations of Place
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Donovan: Two Evocations of Place

I sort of came back from Cuba with an embarressment of riches, but they are mostly performance clips of Rufus Wainwright (I got a good deal of practice filming, which I sorely needed), but they really belong on my Unofficial: Rufus Wainwright page rather than here, so I thought I would post these two Donovan slideshows from early September.

Looking at it now from the perspective of a few weeks,  I think this slideshow sort achieves what it set out to do. “The River Song” is a rather haunting, gentle, meditative song from the Hurdy Gurdy Man album, that showcases Donovan’s intriguing finger picking style (possibly learned Maybelle Carter of the Carter family). This audio recording, which I downloaded from YouTube, sounds as if it was recorded from a vinyl album in that you can hear the pops and hisses that indicate a much played vinyl record (for those of you who remember vinyl albums). Although I have a digital download (yes, I paid for it, and it’s really quite good), nevertheless I kind of like this version–it has a lived in feel (sort of like nature). I was going for a kind of Thoreauvian idyl, immersed in a sharply observed nature while at the same time suggesting an interior journey, sort of like Marvell’s “green thought in a green shade” from his poem “The Garden.” I actually did two edits of this: the one here and another one with a video excerpt from Ryan Larkin’s “Syrinx.” It’s actually still up on my YouTube page if you are curious (it says “Larkin edit” in the title), but ultimately I found the shift to Larkin’s animation a little jarring, which is just what you don’t want in a project like this.  “The River Song” video/slideshow was made with Final Cut Pro, by the way, which I’ve just started using (I think this was my second project with it). I’m still learning it, but that’s where all the fancy overlays come from.

This second slideshow is another evocation of place, this time urban, of Goodge Street in London. I’m pretty sure I’ve been there (and I’ve certainly been in the Tube station), but I don’t have any particularily sharp memories of it (there’s a lot to see in London). Oddly enough, in spite of the daytime focus of the title when I listen to the song I also hear foreshadowings of evening (e.g. the smearing of colors), and again it seems to be describing in it such a way that I wonder whether the light or darkness he describes is exterior to the poet/singer, or interior. Quite a number of the pictures are from Goodge street (I didn’t really try to achieve any unity of time, but a few people will notice Marianne Faithfull), although some evoke, I think, a more generalized London nighttime. Hope you enjoy it as much as people seem to have liked “The River Song.”

Pepper the Cat: An Unofficial Slideshow/Video Set to Joe Walsh’s Funk #49 and Funk #50
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Pepper the Cat: An Unofficial Slideshow/Video Set to Joe Walsh’s Funk #49 and Funk #50

The idea for this slideshow dates back to Catcon near the begining of August. While there, in addition to getting my picture taken with Pudge, and taking lots of photos of cat stuff, I also went to a couple of talks. One of them, by Paul Koudounaris on “Cats of L.A.” included a good deal of information about Pepper the Cat, the first feline movie star who made over a 100 films (mostly shorts) for Mack Sennett studios in the teens and early twenties. She apparently appeared with some of the major stars of the day, including Charlie Chaplin, Ben Turpin, and Mabel Normand, but many of the her early shorts have been lost. As near as I can tell, only a couple are available: The Little Hero, available in a Dutch version on YouTube, and Down on the Farm, a short film (43 minutes) from 1920 that is include on Volume 1 of the Mack SennetI Collection, available on Blue-Ray. I believe a couple more of her films are going to be on Volume 2 which, with a bit of added research, I hope will give me enough material for another short film about her, which I will probably again set to a Joe Walsh song. She was apparently discovered when she crawled out from under the floorboards during filming and the director–who perhaps knew star quality when he saw it–ordered them to keep rolling. Pepper had her screen test, and rest is (little known) cinema history. Although this slideshow has a couple of laughs (they are Mack Sennett comedies, after all), its main purpose is informational. However, the unbelievable guitar work by Joe and his band keep things popping (Funk #49 is from the Guitar Center Sessions; Funk #50 is from Analog Man).