The First Salute

Book written by Barbara Tuchman

I don’t know about you, but I have rather limited access to original historical source material. Even with the advent of so much information at our fingertips, it can still take a degree in advanced library sciences and deep pockets for access fees to find original materials. I’ve toured a few museums with their deep cuts from the past and visited any number of places where important people walked and great events occurred. And that’s all been accompanied by running commentaries from every history teacher I ever had.

Even with the best of intentions, those teachers were limited by time and textbook content to covering certain events in a certain way. Virtually every history course is geared toward turning the past into a long story with a beginning, middle, and end- usually a happy ending when we are young. More than that, history as taught usually has defined heroes and villains, so much so that we forget that those people actually lived and had little perception of themselves in either role- certainly not as the antagonist.

Even the best historical authors fall into the same pattern. After all, we the audience are only human and we remember stories and stories have a certain form geared toward our memories. We do complexity by learning to ask questions of knowledgeable sources. We also develop tools to analyze their answers. That doesn’t make it any easier to remember the answer. If it were otherwise, we would all be chatting about the Theory of Relativity and Global Trade Policy with more than a few choice phrases. Instead, we bond over movies and sporting events and gossip (which is life become story).

For me,

Barbara Tuchman has always been someone available to answer questions. She wasn’t easy to find and her books are thick as the past they chronicle. On the other hand, she has done the heavy lifting. Her research always turned up endless facts which make sense of history. She answers those questions that always lurked beneath any high school history class.

For example, did you ever wonder how come the American Revolution seems to play as a noble fight between two fair-minded armies in which the larger army never really behaved atrociously, despite the fact that the British army were happy to do heinous things everywhere else? Oddly enough, you may not wonder about that anymore in this age of the History Channel. We have so many video portraits of the horrors of life in the past. The colonies always looked much cleaner and war seemed remarkably bloodless in older portraits.

More so, Tuchman had an opinion. Other historians may have had opinions in the 1950s, but they usually kept them to themselves. With personal journalism all too commonplace (even here), her injections of considered thought probably do not seem so unusual, but that reduces none of her brilliance. Of all those voices in my head when I travel, hers is usually the most welcome.

What’s it all about?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 184 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out release regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry post irregularly. Receive notifications on Facebook by friending or following Craig.

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Randy Newman’s Faust

Music and lyrics by Randy Newman

The concept album started with Woody Guthrie, Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, or the Who, depending on what you think a concept album is. Definitions and debates abound. In an era in which the term album is anachronistic, I suppose the simplistic way to look at it would be to say that it is a selection of songs unified by a concept. This does open the Pandora’s box of seeing if you can connect every song on a CD by six degrees or less. (As a side note- that is how you torture a metaphor.) So, when an opera or a musical is recorded, isn’t that a concept album. For that matter, what about song cycles by the likes of Franz Schubert? Is one a recorded musical a subset of the concept album? Vice versa?

The concept album really exists as a way to add gravitas to a recording. Tommy was the way for Pete Townsend to create high art because his day job was making music for the masses, right? We can take Dust Bowl Ballads more seriously because we can… define it?

As someone who writes in a lot of different formats, I have been asked how I know whether or not something is going to be a play or a poem or a novel or a short story or whatever. I don’t always know the exact format, but two things I can usually tell right off. If I am working on demand, then I know exactly what they are looking for. Whether or not that is the case, I also have a pretty good idea if the concept feels big or small.

Randy Newman

has worked brilliantly all over the music map. We may even share those two factors I mentioned in common. When he works on a soundtrack, he know the boundaries and works to them. For songs, he has that down pretty well, if you consider the wonderful ones he has composed over the years: Feels Like Home, I Love L.A., Louisiana 1927, Sail Away, Short People, The Time of Your Life, You Can Leave Your Hat On, and You’ve Got a Friend in Me.

But then the big idea hits and the artist wants to tell a fuller story. The history available about Randy Newman’s Faust suggests it was born a song cycle before becoming a musical. Various attempts were made at adding a book to the songs and they never quite lived up to Newman’s majesty as a composer.

That’s completely fine. Those bursts of big ticket inspiration can be almost complete on their own. Listening to the original recording from 1995 is a full experience. The story of Faust has inspired more versions than perhaps any other. The miracle here is making it seem fresh. Grafting more text ends up creating resonances with earlier works that are unnecessary.

What’s it all about?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 185 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out release regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry post irregularly. Receive notifications on Facebook by friending or following Craig.

Images may be subject to copyright.

Comedian, pod-caster, writer, actor, musician, director, and producer

Marc Maron

I did not know that a comedy routine could be built around Captain Beefheart. Sure, it seems obvious now, but could it really be so brilliant as what Marc Maron managed?

We’re all at least a little damaged, which means that we ought to be more sympathetic toward one another. In practice, we tend to need reminding because our damage does not necessarily jibe with someone else’s. When that happens, we can all behave like jackasses or worse.

Enter art as one way to translate personal damage into a consumable message. Sometimes the message is oblique, as in a painting by Jackson Pollack or Citizen Kane, where you can feel the raw end of the artist’s emotion, but perhaps not tune in directly to the source of the damage. Maybe that makes it harder to see the person behind the tools, but they are so very much there.

Stand-up comedy

provides few tools to hide behind, except for those disturbingly skinny enough to disappear behind a microphone stand. Many, many comedians take the world we share and push it back out at us filtered through their neurons, which is great. Robin Williams and George Carlin were masters at that. Others take their own lives and share, building a sense of common experience that way. Whether or not it’s accurate, I remember Richard Pryor being one of the first. The thing that Pryor did, also, was meld the two approaches successfully. More than any other comedian at the time, he took his personal experiences which felt common to all of us and turned them into a commentary on the world we shared. Lenny Bruce may have pointed the way on that.

Nowadays, that personal path to universal commentary seems almost commonplace. Quite a few comics use it to test where our edges are as a society. So many do that in fact that it appears the easier road, though I doubt it. Either way, I find few who use their personal experience to such brilliant effect as Maron- just listen to his visit to The Creation Museum.

Perhaps the best aspect of this approach to comedy and art is the way that it invites us in. When the artist aims for shock, then they likely accomplish their goal. We’re animals with adrenal glands and eyes pointed in one direction. We do shock very well. It’s much harder to build a relationship through art, especially since all art is discrete in time and space. The artist has no guarantee of attention or repeated viewings. Creating a community by standing in front of us and talking is simply brilliant.

What’s it all about?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 186 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out release regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry post irregularly. Receive notifications on Facebook by friending or following Craig.

Images may be subject to copyright.