Everything in a Blender
Saturday, July 31, 2004
The day of Georges, cooking, and shopping
iPods and iTunes are SO cool. I just got a CD of a fantastic George Harrison record from 1979. That was the year my father died, so I missed out on some really good music. (In the Jewish religion's mourning rituals, subsequent to someone's death, the children of the deceased are forbidden from listening to music or going to parties or celebratory events for one year.). One of the records was George Harrison's eponymous album. But it's been reissued. If I remember correctly, it only had one top 40 single, "Blow Away".
I want to take all my music with me on the iPod. The iPod has the capability to "import songs"...All that means is..you stick the CD in your computer, and your computer asks you what you want to do with it. If you have iTunes installed, one of your choices will be to bring the songs into the iTunes music library. When you do that, you can sync the iPod to your music library.
George's eponymous album is a fantastic record. George Harrison was SO underappreciated. John Lennon was a bit of a radical spirit...Activist, protestor, etc...Ringo was...well, he's Ringo. Whatever. George is an unbelievable musician..I think some of George's greatness lies in his spirituality. He also has quite a cool sense of humor. He helped to finance Monty Python movies.
Paul McCartney is extremely talented but...so much of his later music is bubblegum. With George, there is something spiritual and life-affirming in his music. Paul wrote many GREAT "ditties"..and a few truly great masterworks of popular music. Paul wrote "Yesterday" (did you know that the working title of the song Yesterday was "Scrambled Eggs"?). "Yesterday" may well have been performed by more popular artists (for record) than any popular song in history.
George, on the other hand, wrote biting satirical songs like Taxman . He also wrote a great song called Piggies about politicians. He wrote Something and Here Comes The Sun. And THAT was while he was still a Beatle. Post-Beatles he got sued for My Sweet Lord . He's such a wonderful composer, it is SO obvious he had no need to "lift" someone else's song. He'd listened to '60s music all his life, and the song crept into his brain..and. it came out in this remanufactured form. Yes, I think he should have paid, and he did. But he did not consciously plagiarize. No one ever alleged that he DID consciously plagiarize He's So Fine. But he did indeed lift from the Chiffons song.
He wrote SO many great songs in his post-Beatles career. This eponymous album has so many good songs on it. And the performances are terrific too. Steve Winwood is a side musician on it. George had a really good album or two after this one. Then he did more great work with The Traveling Wilburys.
I'm listening to the great eponymous album as I type this. It's so positive. If you like George at all, you'll love this. And if you like George, you MUST see George's official website. It's so cool. It uses Flash artistically..so few sites do that. Most overdo Flash.
I'm about to burn (okay, that was a not quite so intended pun) a George Burns and Gracie Allen compilation. My iPod has mostly standup comedy and big band. There's some orchestral stuff, some rock on it..but it's mostly an educational tool. I also have my big band arrangements on it..so that I can listen to work in progress.
Today was quite the shopping day. I bought 19 bags of groceries. I do a monster grocery shop about once a month (for two people). This one was $380. A typical shop is more like 12 to 15 bags, ranging from $220 to $260.
I love to make a monster lasagna after a monster shop. I'm told by various people that my lasagna's good. It's my favorite bit of cooking during the month. I invite the staff over to partake of the lasagna.
Off to listen to George!
Sunday, July 18, 2004
Dead Like Me. WOW
When I first saw the ads for Dead Like Me--a Showtime series, I figured it was just a show about death and dying. SUCH a fun topic, no? Well, when Alan Ball pitched Six Feet Under to HBO, on the heels of his success with American Beauty, I guess they went nuts for anything he was doing. That made the death and dying thing hot. I guess goth made it hot well before that, though.
However, Dead Like Me is not a copycat show.
I won't bother to explain the show here. Read about it in the links above. The strange thing for me about this show is that the suspension of disbelief is not necessary. The writing is so good, and the characters so interesting and funny, that I really forget that there are no undead (at least none that I know about, but I guess that's the point, ain't it?).
I see characters like Delores Herbig, and think I know someone just like that. Delores might be a TAD extreme. I don't think she'd survive ten minutes in New York. All that cheery happiness would make most New Yorkers physically ill. If she were to quit Happy Time and ramp up her "Getting Things Done With Delores", she'd at least have a public access show here.
I'm very excited that the new season starts soon.
What a shallow life I lead. At least I get to do SOME good things outside of work.
I've started to write again. I will ask my attorney about posting MP3s of my original arrangements here, and on my personal website. If I can do that, I will.
Maybe some of you will like the big band charts I'm writing.
Father's birthday (Not An Average Joe)
Speaking of dead.... (talk about a cold segue)
Had my father been alive, today would have been his 71st birthday. He was born July 18, 1933 in Sibiu, Romania, and died February 20, 1979.
Hitler came to power in '33 as Chancellor. Therefore my father was 6 in 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland. Romania wasn't too far behind. Hitler got to Romania in July of 1940. My father was either 6 or 7, depending on the day Hitler invaded.
Happy Birthday, Dad, ay? How do you schmooze a Nazi guard? $20? Maybe they were not committed enough to their ideals to see past a couple of bucks. Whatever my father and his sisters did to survive, I'm happy they got through.
I have no idea. My aunts were, I think, younger than he was. I wouldn't want to ask them such things (assuming they'd even talk to me), even if they knew the answer. But, that's Dad--The Early Years.
Almost all people are complicated. When I was growing up, I thought my father was at once a good man, a show off, and a hypocrite. Not that I'm any great role model. But, with my mother's guidance, and just the passage of time, I see a little more clearly now some of the things he was trying to do.
He did have quite a bit of Ralph Kramden in him. He was always going about some get rich quick scheme. When that failed (which it always did), he would return to what we colloquially call being a "professional Jew". In his case, that meant he would return to the synagogue (not any one synagogue, but rather to being a professional in the world of Jewish congregational matters). He would typically get a job performing or assisting in ritual duties. He was quite skillful and knowledgeable when it came to matters of the congregational /communal aspects of Judaism. He had read from the Torah (as part of Jewish prayer services) so many times that he needed very little preparation to be ready to do so in public.
This really was noteworthy, as Torah scrolls contain no vowels or punctuation. Furthermore, when the Torah is read in public, it is intoned with melody. There is no notation on the Torah scroll indicating for the intoning/chants. That's one more thing one must memorize.
There are very specific melodic sequences applied to Torah reading. They serve, in part, as punctuation, and partly as illustration/drama. There is also a whole 'nother level of meaning to the "trop" (melodic notation used when reading from the Torah).
The Torah scrolls are written in a very precise Hebrew calligraphy. The Hebrew alphabet contains no vowels. The vowel sounds are provided by symbols below the letters. However, the vowel sounds' symbols are not written into the scrolls. As such, one reading from the Torah would have to know the text well enough to decipher it without vowels. In the Hebrew language it's very easy to make a mistake and mispronounce a word if one uses the wrong vowel sound, thus changing the meaning of the word. If the one reading from the Torah were to reverse the vowel sounds in the Hebrew word for water (mayim), the resulting word (miyam) would mean "from the sea".
Since the Torah is the Holy Book, mispronouncing a word, would alter its meaning. By extension, it would alter the meaning of the verse it's in. That could amount to heresy. We don't like that kind of thing, and try to avoid it.
In addition to having to read letters with vowels that aren't there, and decipher sentence structure, one must know, and correctly apply the melodic sequences/chants associated with each word or phrase in the portion of the Torah being read for the congregation at a given time. This is a lot of memorization. With no vowels, the occasional word that's purposely misspelled, or which appears differently than it is to be pronounced, no punctuation, and the melodic chanting, reading from a Torah scroll is no walk in the park for the average Joe. My father was not an Average Joe.
He was an outgoing fellow (much like Ralph), loved to sing. He also loved to entertain. He often led people in song...whether they wanted to sing or not. But his joy was contagious.
During the high holy days in the mid to late 1970s, my father and our family prayed at the auditorium of Fair Lawn High School. Our synagogue could not fit all the three-day-a-year Jews, plus the regular congregation who showed up. For several years, our congregation hired Velvel Pasternak to lead the high holy day services. What a voice on him! He was, and is, quite the musician. I hope he's still alive and well.
My father was like The Supremes to Velvel's Diana Ross (oh, how my Rabbi would smack me if he saw that comparison). My father would chime in during the little lulls in the cadences of Velvel's singing, chanting, and intoning. My father had a little riff he liked to belt out during these lulls. My father's riff caught on.
Pretty soon, people started singing along with my father's interim-riff (riffus interruptus). It became like a big band "call and response" kind of thing. In many big band arrangements, first the saxes made a statement (Notice how we've effortlessly moved back about 30 years in our music history lesson, boys and girls), then the brass would respond with a short little riff to fill in during the saxes' rest. But I digress.
I vaguely remember hearing people in our congregation say how they were looking forward to this year's services so that they could sing along with Velvel and "answer" along with Joe (that's my father). Yosef Tzvi (that's his Hebrew name) /Hersz (that's his Romanian name).
When I got older and heard others, in communities far flung from Fair Lawn (say THAT 5 times fast, why don'tcha..come on "Far Flung from Fair Lawn, Far...you get it), singing my father's Rosh HaShana riff, I wondered where it had come from. One day I'll ask my good friend Jonathan Rimberg .
Jonathan studied with my father at one time. Nothing musical, I don't think. I only remember that Jonathan would come to the house on the occasional Saturday afternoon to study with my father, and subsequently spend time with me. I think my father helped Jonathan with Talmud, though I'm not sure.
My father was a man of many skills. I remember at one time there was discussion about our house about him being a simultaneous translator for the UN. He was quite facile with languages..but probably not U.N. good.
I know that he spoke English, Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Hungarian, French, Arabic, Czech, and probably Roumanian (I suppose..I wouldn't know it from Czech). I imagine he knew other languages too. He probably could have learned the Asian languages since they're so inflection-oriented, and my Dad was very good about listening for tonalities in language. I imagine all that training for Torah chanting may have helped those abilities along quite a bit.
In my father's house, as in the homes of many immigrant families, a sentence could consist of words in several languages. Conversations would begin in English, have two words of Yiddish, make a sudden left turn into French, and end in Hungarian. It was quite amusing and strange. When I was in my single-digit years I would often listen and try and guess what language was the one of the moment. My first language was French, so deciphering that one that was easy. I learned Hebrew in school. Yiddish is a mixture of (street) German and Hebrew..On all those other Eastern European languages, it was anyone's guess.
Usually, in immigrant families, the lapse into a second or third language happens because someone doesn't know the English word for whatever the ...oddity of the moment is. Some people use several languages in one sentence because there is no word or phrase in the first language that conveys precisely what a word or phrase from some other language "nails". (See "nails" is one of those verbs that works in colloquial, American English that may not have an equivalent in, say, Chinese).
Enough of that. Happy Birthday, Dad--you above-average Joe.
Sunday, July 04, 2004
Independence Day
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I feel like I could be doing much better financially. I should be. I feel lazy, since I'm not doing as well as I "should"
Thank God there's comedy.
