(I rediscovered these recordings a little while ago, then realized I'd already done a post on them. Well, if Ican stand to hear them again, so can you!)
There's not much to say about singing like this - not even words to describe it, but I'll try. Most of these are "vanity" recordings, kind of like self-published books, and thus are a whole new definition of awfulness. But at some point, these people must have thought they could sing. Who told them that? Whoever it was should be incarcerated. At very least, there should be a stiff fine.
Ah! Emanuele Bucalo. You may ask - who is he? You will know even less about him after you hear this. But I will say, it's funny. There used to be a Hanna-Barbera duck character named Yakky Doodle, and this is who he reminds me of. Not even as tuneful as Donald Duck.
Sirach Van Bodegraven is another infamously un-famous singer who deserved his reputation. He has a way of blundering through the classics in hell-bent fashion, singing so badly that it's often hard to tell what the hell the song is supposed to be. Here he eviscerates Vesti la Giubba from Pagliacci with true operatic gusto. Or is it gutso?
Encore, encore! To thunderous applause (or is that a thunderstorm? Can't tell, my ears just went blank), Sirach treats us to his inimitable rendition of that other opera standard, Nessun Dorma. This is only marginally worse than listening to those fat adolescent boys in spandex body suits butcher it on America's Got Talent. Note to the audience: LOUD singing isn't GOOD singing.
Now, here we have "The Highest Voice". That is the title of the video, so that is what I am going to call it. It is the highest voice, I suppose, if screeching at the top of your lungs and "sort of" hitting the note counts. I had to read the YouTube description to find out who this was. It's Susie Summers! Sounds like someone from a Gidget movie, or maybe one of those dolls with hair you can pull out of its head so it reaches the floor. Anyway, Susie Summers is singing The Doll Song (appropriate!) by Offenbach, whom I don't believe for a minute wrote it the way she is singing it.
Adele's Laughing Song! But we're not laughing.
Thomas Burns may just be the Michelangelo of bad singing. The piano introduction seems to be preparing us for singing that is romantic and tinged with melancholy, and instead we get a constipated Elmer Fudd. I have heard that Burns was a close friend of that other scion of bad singing, Florence Foster Jenkins (badly portrayed by Meryl Streep, whose performing is now so weighed down by mannerisms that she looks like a candidate for Dr. Nowzardan). Maybe not, though - I think he was just added on to a CD of Jenkins' recordings to pad it out a bit. Florence only recorded a dozen or so arias, or perhaps the others just exploded into bits. When Burns sings, "O, Margarita", though. . . do I even need to finish that sentiment?
I shouldn't include this one, and I feel a little ashamed of myself, but here it is anyway because it is just so horrendous. It's not just bad singing - it's drunk singing, from a soprano who should know better. What's both touching and cringeworthy about it is how the tenor just keeps on valiantly singing, not trying to carry her but just keep his head barely above water. What else can he do - escort her off the stage? Really, someone should have, if only for her own sake. I had to look up her name - she's a well-known singer, when sober, with the incredible handle of Dragana Jugovic del Monaco. Yikes!
Natalie de Andrade. I can't find out anything about her. Obviously she must have performed somewhere, or her puss wouldn't be plastered on this programmy-looking thing. But she is awful. Simply awful. This sounds like a rehearsal, but of what, I can't say.
I have some serious issues with the two people who came to my door on a freezing-cold evening, right at supper hour, and said, "Thanks for coming to the door! We're collecting for UNICEF!" I said, "We don't give at the door", and closed it. But of course, being a good Canadian who had politeness jackhammered into her as a child, I felt "bad" as I went back to my already-getting-cold dinner. But I didn't want to stand there shuffling from foot to foot while they gave their spiel and I fished around for some money to get this transaction over with.
I think door-to-door donation is a VERY bad idea in this age of widespread fraud, even if charities actually still do it, because I've heard stories that they won't even take your cash now and want your credit card info (! How dumb do they think I am?), or will only sign you up for monthly donations. I'm not against that, in fact we already do it from the security of our PayPal account. Certainly it feels safer than handing your money over to "someone" who says he's from UNICEF.
It's hard enough to overcome a highly-warranted suspicion about people holding their hands out in the dark, especially when you've been trying to de-stress with your loved ones at the dinner table. But that leads to another question. Since when is this still OK during COVID? How easy is it to stay six feet apart when handing someone a wad of cash? What are the regulations now, and who has the extra money to spare when businesses are failing all over the place? Yes, I know kids overseas have it even worse, but is it helpful to remind me of that as I stand there wondering if I can even afford to give them anything?
In addition to all this unpleasantness at dinnertime, I don't honestly want a person I don't know coming to my door unless it is some sort of real emergency. Bill and I recently made a pact: the ONLY business we do at the door now is Girl Guide cookies. (BTW, there used to be someone who came around every year with no affiliation at all, saying he was collecting money to buy milk for homeless mothers. I think it went straight into his pocket. If he comes around again, I'll tell him my daughter is a TV reporter who's doing a story on donation fraud, and watch him skedaddle away from my doorway forever.)
My favorite version of our national anthem. Even without words, it expresses so much about what it is to be Canadian - with breathtaking glimpses, lightning edits, a glorious chorus - and even a puck drop at the end! I can't get through this without tears.
Anyone who follows this blog (and, admittedly, that would be mostly me) will notice I come around to certain subjects on a cyclic basis. Having heard and been completely entranced by Bob Dylan's latest album, recorded when he was 79 years old and apparently in yet another flowering of his startling lyric genius, I'm now in a Dylanish, Bobbyish phase once again.
I have my favorites, but because he has written so many hundreds of songs it's hard to pick just one, or even just a dozen. I became attached to one of his earlier albums, Desire, in part because of the unusual violin stylings of Scarlet Rivera, but largely because of some truly kick-ass songs. It isn't Dylan at his best, but it's a more relaxed and self-revealing Dylan than most, with some memorable and sweetly pining love songs. One More Cup of Coffee stands out for its breathtakingly succinct language:
Your sister tells the future, like your mother and yourself
You never learned to read and write, there's no books upon your shelf
And your pleasure knows no limits, your voice is like a meadowlark
But your heart is like an ocean, mysterious and dark
One more cup of coffee for the road
One more cup of coffee 'fore I go
To the valley below.
How Dylan can cram an entire biography, not to mention a family history, into a few deft lines is completely beyond me - but that's genius for you. You can't define it, but you know when you are in its presence.
But while wandering around inside this one-of-my-many-favorite Dylan albums, I rediscovered a tender love ballad called Oh, Sister - and remembered that this song led to a famous, if not infamous, musical feud.
It was obvious to anyone who knew the situation that Oh, Sister was written - not for, but AT Joan Baez, expressing some obvious hurt and self-pity for having been "wronged" by someone he felt so close to that they could have been (ick!) brother and sister. Dylan doesn't have a sister, and it's kind of evident by these sentiments. But it's also pretty manipulative stuff, and as usual with Dylan, you kind of have to pull it apart to really get at it.
Oh, Sister Bob Dylan
Oh, sister, when I come to lie in your arms You should not treat me like a stranger Our Father would not like the way that you act And you must realize the danger
Oh, sister, am I not a brother to you And one deserving of affection And is our purpose not the same on this earth To love and follow his direction
We grew up together From the cradle to the grave We died and were reborn And then mysteriously saved
Oh, sister, when I come to knock on your door Don't turn away, you'll create sorrow Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore You may not see me tomorrow
Oh, sister - where do we start? This is a really short song, but as usual, it's packed with megatons of import. The first couple of lines aren't just reproachful: they actually contain the word "should", as if he has the right to dictate how she feels about him. From the erotic reference to lying in her arms (which can also be seen as a mother thing), he quickly segues to "Our Father", as if he's suddenly saying the Lord's Prayer. Dylan's entrenched religiosity can be a real ambush which is difficult to endure right in the middle of a supposed love song.
And as for the line "realize the danger" - of what? Even if we don't go there, we find in the next stanza that he thinks he's "deserving of affection", which she is obviously withholding. He also jumps the gun on not only HIS, but HER purpose here on earth, assuring her (and assuming) that he knows more about it than she does, though it's doubtful he ever asked.
"We grew up together/From the cradle to the grave" - well, it WAS the '60s, wasn't it, and they were in a kind of glamourous blaze of folkie love, but that "cradle to the grave" bit also seems to jump the gun. Not only are they not dead yet, they're still only in their thirties. And all that died-and-reborn stuff is a little heavy for a love ballad. Dylan is still hiding behind his heavy-handed Christianity - but wait, this was BEFORE all that happened! The symptoms of the disease were already there: self-righteousness mascarading as piety.
The last verse is deceptively beautiful, but similarly "loaded": if she dares turn him away, she's going to "create sorrow" - not just for him, but for both of them, if not the whole world. Ahem! "You may not see me tomorrow" sounds almost like a threat. Is he going to die or what? Come on, Bob, make it clear.
The funny and really Dylan-ish thing about this song is that, when you hear him sing it, it sounds sweetly sentimental, full of lyricism and longing, not the piece of subversive abuse that it truly is. Dylan manipulated Baez like a yo-yo for years, jerking the string just as she was getting over him (see the truly incredible Diamonds and Rust, the only song she ever wrote which was a worthy adversary of the Dylan one-two punch). She STILL isn't over him, if a recent PBS special is any indication - she goes all dewy-eyed and then even apologizes for his cruelty to her, saying she just didn't understand back then what he was all about. (As if he wasn't busy telling her that, not to mention what SHE was all about.)
But at the time, some time in the '70s, Baez's reaction to Oh, Sister was one of white-hot fury. Dylan had the effrontery to keep his marriage to Sara Lowndes a secret, not just from the whole world but from the woman he supposedly cherished as a soul mate. Baez didn't even know about Sara until she heard Bob was sick, popped in to see him, and his wife, who happened to be a dark-eyed fashion model, opened the door. It was one of the worst betrayals in popular music history, and the song is one long vomit of the toxins his deception created.
I had trouble even posting it here because it seethed and fumed and even spewed vitriol. Because Baez is Baez and unable to cram all this into one line like "you'd know what a drag it is to see you", it goes on for verses and verses. I watch true crime shows, though I probably shouldn't, and when someone is stabbed to death, they are always stabbed 47 times, and it always turns out to be a family member or spouse. It's called "overkill", something that can only be perpetrated by someone with intense feelings for the victim.
The opposite of love isn't hate. It's indifference. Baez takes a lot of verses to purge herself, is as nasty as she knows how to be, and even uses a refrain (take it easy, but take it) that comes directly out of a Woody Guthrie song.
I do wonder, if Dylan paid any attention to this at the time, how much it affected him. Though I always saw something one-sided in their immortal Darby-and-Joan (or Bonnie and Clyde) connection, Dylan rhapsodized about Baez during an interminable acceptance speech he gave for some award or other a few years ago. Who knows what THAT was about. He talked for half an hour, when it's more normal for him to just take the award and run.
This never gets resolved.
Dylan will turn 80 in a couple of months - yes, eighty freaking years old, and Baez might be there already. Dylan has suddenly hit the jackpot - AGAIN - proving he has more creative lives than a wildcat (bobcat?), and isn't finished with us yet. Are these two extremely old people still attached by some freakish umbilical cord born of history, twins like Castor and Pollux (excuse me, I've been listening to Dylan's latest album and it's chock-a-block with mythology)? Or did they just get thrown together by a simple twist of fate?
Oh, Brother! Joan Baez
You've got eyes like Jesus But you speak with a viper's tongue We were just sitting around on earth Where the hell did you come from? With your lady dressed in deerskin And an amazing way about her When are you going to realize That you just can't live without her?
Take it easy Take it light But take it
Your lady gets her power From the goddess and the stars You get yours from the trees and the brooks And a little from life on Mars And I've known you for a good long while And would you kindly tell me, mister How in the name of the Father and the Son Did I come to be your sister?
Take it easy Take it light But take it
You've done dirt to lifelong friends With little or no excuses Who endowed you with the crown To hand out these abuses? Your lady knows about these things But they don't put her under Me, I know about them, too And I react like thunder
Take it easy Take it light But take it
I know you are surrounded By parasites and sycophants When I come to see you I dose up on coagulants Because when you hurl that bowie knife It's going to be when my back is turned Doing some little deed for you And baby, will I get burned
Take it easy Take it light But take it
So little brother when you come To knock on my door I don't want to bring you down But I just went through the floor My love for you extends through life And I don't want to waste it But honey, what you've been dishing out You'd never want to taste it And if I had the nerve To either risk it or to break it I'd put our friendship on the line And show you how to take it
Take it easy Take it light But take it
SPECIAL BONUS RECORD. Like those cereal-box records I collected as a kid, I can't help but share the magic of this. It's just one of the songs on Dylan's latest album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, which is among the best he has ever done. Though it might be said the song is about Joan, I think it more likely that it's about his most faithful love: the love of his Saviour, his truest friend always, the Son of Man.
There’s an ad that comes on TV during the news (which I still watch to see my daughter the reporter), I can’t remember what the ad is for, and it goes like, “Some day you’ll be able to. . . “ in a sort of syrupy, Hallmark Channel woman’s voice. They then show all the things we can’t do: family gatherings with everyone beaming, public events with crowds, weddings, etc. etc. etc. The purpose of this seems to be to make us all feel better about what we are going through now.
But to me, negative, antisocial me, it’s like sitting a person down at a banquet table and saying, “Some day you’ll be able to eat this”, not having any idea when that “some day” will come (months? Years?). We are also not supposed to complain about our lot, as others always have it far worse, and besides, people got through World War II and the Spanish flu pandemic, didn’t they? Not to mention the Great Plague of Europe. So. . . we must be chipper, upbeat, watch ads about all the things we can’t do, wonder when we WILL be able to do them, and realize (as I have come to realize) that this culture will never be the same. COVID will likely return cyclically like flu viruses, and keep mutating like flu viruses, so we will need to KEEP getting vaccinated and continue to dread it as it becomes more deadly and the viruses become immune to the vaccines.
Meantime, the mutations seem to get more communicable all the time. Social isolation is already a pandemic and was a serious problem before all this, and will likely escalate and become a sort of new normal. Rebuilding thousands of sunken businesses will be long, laborious, and sometimes impossible. Online sales/service will become much more standard, so people will seldom need to leave the house. These are the things I see happening and which won’t go away. In some instances it’s an advantage: my son can work from home instead of commuting from Port Coquitlam to Vancouver every day. But I keep thinking extroverts must be going through hell now. And even more disturbing is what this is doing to kids: literally robbing them of some of the more fun and stimulating aspects of childhood.
Christmas was cancelled last year, and we may well have to cancel it again this year – we can’t count on it, for sure. One year in the life of a young child is FOREVER (if you can remember back to what it was like waiting for Christmas), and they can never get that fun and joy back. And what about that SECOND crop of young adults who will be unable to attend their grad - because, for the second year in a row, grad has been cancelled, along with most of the other rites of passage that help to form their adult identity?
Fortunately, most people I know are introverts who don't crave the party scene, but we still feel the lack of ACTUAL contact, as in being in the same room with someone we love. Zoom calls will soon be seen as a standard substitute, and then, once in a blue moon, we’ll see an article about “mental health” which tells us all to take a walk outside, breathe deeply, and think about how great it will be when this is all over. (In truth, it is much more like holding our breath.) Or – even worse – we’ll be told to “reach out for help”, which was never there to begin with (sorry, we have no beds. Here’s a prescription. Now go home and behave yourself). There apparently are computerized therapists now who just repeat back the last thing you said with a question mark at the end of it. Or Siri will talk to us! She’s always good for a chat.
My Grumpy Troll Sextette sings an old-timey tune, while Hugo the white-haired Lothario tries to woo the fair Simone. This leads to bitter rivalry (not really), and the inevitable romantic disaster.
Something has been bothering me, a lot, and I’ve gone back and forth on posting about it. Originally I was going to make a YouTube commentary, but couldn’t bring myself to do it without going off the deep end. Then I thought of Facebook, but knew I could get myself into all kinds of trouble there, and that’s the last thing I want.
This incident happened some months ago, when I saw a rare post from a Facebook friend whose posts never seemed to show up in my feed (and only about 10 per cent of my “friends” ever appear there. It's always the same-old. The reason? Facebook assumes that, because they're in my feed a lot, it’s what I want, so gives me “more of the same”).
In typical Facebook fashion, this is someone I know of, but don’t know personally, and with whom I have over a hundred Facebook friends in common. In part due to his platform as an edgy "alternative" arts journalist, he has been quite open about his lifelong struggles with mental illness, believing (and I truly agree with this) that this topic needs to be hauled out of the shadows where it never belonged in the first place. But something was very amiss with his post.
I went on his page to see what was going on. The posts were strange and kind of scary. He used the word “manic” several times, in a lot of different connotations (including some crude sexual references the likes of which I could not find anywhere else on his page). There were veiled and not-so-veiled references to self-destruction and violent death. This made me very uneasy, but far worse than that were the comments: the dozens of “LOLs” and “right ons” and even “awesomes”, as if his readers were finding all of it hugely entertaining.
In spite of or maybe because of the work he had done illuminating mental health issues, people apparently thought this was some kind of exuberant prank and were egging him on. Meantime, hints of suicide kept showing through. He mentioned looking down the seventeen stories of his apartment building and imagined “impaling myself on the maples below”. More LOL’s, more “right ons”, dozens of idiot emojis - and (worst of all) “Hey, we’ve all been there” (which we HAVEN’T. Nothing is more bogus and potentially dangerous as empty, false “empathy”, pretending to know what it feels like when you absolutely do NOT. It’s like saying you know about cancer from a mosquito bite.)
The posts escalated, becoming more florid and making less sense, along with photos that were increasingly alarming, until someone – a family member, I believe - posted with great urgency that anyone who had seen him should contact the family immediately. They didn’t know where he was.
Most of the comments by now expressed concern, but there were still a few dimwitted remarks (“Hey, it's all good! You’re Canada’s gonzo journalist, mate!”) People who compare someone to Hunter S. Thomson should be reminded of how his life ended, with a single gunshot wound to the head. When the family finally announced they had called the police, most were relieved, but others still went on and on about “oh, no, you didn’t call the COPS on him!” The trouble with unburying mental illness from its airless crypt is that you uproot a whole array of primitive, ignorant, even goddamn stupid attitudes that go with it, such as denial and misperception and totally inappropriate “seeing the funny side” when it really isn’t too damn funny at all. I'm not against it, but humor about such a subject only comes in retrospect. Perspective equals time plus distance. Can you make jokes about heart disease when you’re flat on your back and fighting for your life?
There was a brief update from his brother about how grateful he was to the police for getting him safely to the hospital. This seemed to shut up the idiot Greek chorus for a while. "Police" is such a knee-jerk term, especially to jerks who don't think. The police are trained to deal with people in all kinds of distress, for all kinds of reasons, and for the most part, they do their job very well. But people still use terms that reflect very dated, primitive thinking: "they dragged him off", "they threw him in a mental hospital", etc., when very likely no person was "thrown" at all. Some still use that most horrendous and dehumanizing of terms: "they put him away". It's one of those holdovers from another century (or two) that deserves to disappear.
I see two kinds of posts on FB about the “hot topic” of mental health (the term seemingly replacing “mental illness”, which assumed you could never be well): boilerplate posts as ready-made as a microwave dinner (“Most of you won’t even bother to read this far” and “copy and paste this message, DON’T share, just to show you care!”, emoji, emoji, emoji). I always have the vague uneasy feeling that someone is making money off these things. To alleviate that vague guilt that hangs around most of us these days, people WILL copy and paste the thing, hoping they've done their bit to "raise awareness" and can just get on with their day.
The other approach is much like the “cancer awareness” thing where it seems like a bunch of cheerleaders waving pink pom-poms. In this case, God only knows where your donations end up. I’m not saying we shouldn’t address the subject - quite the opposite. But let’s really talk, talk about things that are real and painful, not spout easy platitudes and rah-rah for the team. Believe it or not, there is a time when "being positive" is the last thing you need to do.
I think depression and PTSD have largely come out of the closet, which is a start, though celebrities still “admit” they suffered from depression years and years ago (NEVER recently – that’s still too great a risk). PTSD is associated with first responders, military heroes, sometimes cops, but that’s about it. If you were sexually abused as a child and can barely function, that’s not it, it has to be called something else. Due to media emphasis and a certain level of social discomfort, PTSD has been largely claimed by heroic figures running into burning buildings. People insist they’re even more heroic for the tremendously risky act of seeking help.
I won't say much about myself because it is too excruciating, except to say that when I "disclosed" to a literary agent that I have bipolar disorder, she emailed me back with two words: "You're brave." It struck me as a remark along the lines of, "I wish I had the nerve to wear that dress." The "brave" thing was weird, because I could have bipolar disorder and be the biggest chicken on the block. Having it doesn't automatically make you "brave". So I guess she thought I was brave to have the nerve to tell her such a thing. I was left with the feeling that I had done something that had made her profoundly uncomfortable.
I like to say, and often people don’t have a clue what I mean, that when it comes to mental illness, we haven’t had our Stonewall yet. We're about where LGBTQ people were in 1970. Why do I insist on being so "negative"? Every day, people bandy about terms like “whack job”, "psycho", "fruitcake" and “nutbar”, expressing casual contempt for people who, like my Facebook friend, COULD NOT HELP his behaviour, because that is the nature of the illness. The mentally ill are the very last group of people in our culture whom you can vilify, mock and dismiss with no penalties, because no one even notices you’re doing it. We all say those things, don’t we? Why is it such a problem? It doesn’t really mean anything. Can't we say anything any more? Why are you so damned oversensitive?
I lost a beloved brother, the one confidante and support I had in a childhood lived in an emotional war zone, to the damaging effects of schizophrenia, back when all they could do for people was drug them senseless to keep them from “acting out”. And yes, sometimes we lost track of him, didn’t know where he was and had to call the police, and it was horrific. Then when the worst happened, my mother-in-law said to me in a terrible double-entendre, “at least now you know where he is.” Why does it have to get that bad? It doesn't. If the health care system were more complete, if there were enough beds, if people would drop their mockery and horror and act human, as human as they probably could be if they tried - but I digress. My point is, what you say reflects what you think. It displays your understanding or your ignorance, not just to your Facebook friends but to the world. Sometimes the less you say the better. Just keep it simple. Take care. I love you. Be well.
