Let's Get Lost

Title: The Best of Chet Baker Sings: Let's Get Lost
Media: audio CD

I go to this CD again and again as one of my top 10 favorite vocal performances. Chet Baker's vocals are in the same category as Billie Holiday's. Neither Chet nor Billie are going to knock you out with pure talent like Sinatra or Sarah Vaughn, but they possess a haunting quality that enters your gut, your emotional center, your imagination. I want to describe Baker's vocals and trumpet playing as ghostly and sensual, if something can be both immaterial and caressing simultaneously.

Alias Mr. Alden

Title: Alias Mr. Alden from The Whistler
Media: CD

I am certain this half hour radio show from 1952 is as good or better than any half hour of television on today. This show could easily be padded and turned into a fine film noir. It is a classic double - double cross with a femme fatal to boot. Both characters are after the safety deposit key of the recently murdered Mr. Alden and neither can be trusted. In the end the woman ends up with the money and kills the man pretending to be Mr. Alden. Finally, in classic Whistler style, a seemingly insignificant act, in this case the man typing the woman's name on a check on a new ribbon, becomes the guilty party's undoing. In this case her name typed on that new ribbon was plain for the policew to see. "I'm sure something in this room will tell us why your name was typed by the murdered Mr. Alden!" (Key whistle, thank you Signal Oil.)

Belle De Jour

Media: Film
Title: Belle De Jour (1967)
Director: Luis Bunuel

Belle De Jour is the second masterpiece of French cinema I have seen this year. (Rules of the Game being the other.) Looking as beautiful as any one you have ever seen on film, Catherine Deneuve plays Severine, an emotionless, young, upper class wife suffering through the most intense case of ennui. In a way she is similar to Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate (also 1967). She seemingly has everything (wealth, beautiful doctor husband, ski vacations) and her whole life before her, but she is paralyzed with a feeling of emptiness; and like Hoffman’s Benjamin, she turns to illicit sex to feel something, anything in her barren life. This movie also contains one of the greatest screen thugs in all film. The thug is Severine inversed. He too is young, disillusioned and disconnected from society. But where Severine is inert the thug is perpetually on the knife’s edge of violence. Despite being different in every societal aspect they share at their core a feeling of estrangement from the world, and this draws them to each other.

Belle De Jour deserves multiple viewings and much conversation to fully explore all the themes and ideas saturating this work of art.

Chet Baker

(Now that I'm getting back into the work routine, let's see if I can get back into the blog routine.)

Media: CD
Title: Chet Baker: Complete 1952 Fantasy and Pacific Jazz Sessions


Tonight I listened to Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan playing on "The Complete 1952 Fantasy and Pacific Jazz Sessions". Loved it, especially 'Lullaby of the Leaves' and 'My Funny Valentine'. Close your eyes and listen to the sections where Baker and Mulligan play together, Mulligan low and out front and Baker with his high ghost-whisper playing behind him. Just beautiful.

Where the Reading Takes You

Title: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Media: Book

YouThis past autumn I began a reading project I first heard on KUOW public radio. You start with one book. The second book you read will be inspired by some idea, theme, character, etc. in the first. Qualities in this second book inspire a third title, and so on until the project ends or you start again from a new book.

I just finished Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. A really amazing biography of MLK that explores only, but in great depth, King’s work as a public figure beginning in 1956 with the Montgomery Bus Boycott (inspired by Rosa Park) and ends with his death in 1968 when he had switched his mission to the larger hopes of economic justice and working to the end the Vietnam War. My most clear take away: King hardly slept over these 12 years fighting for justice and was often a reluctant leader bearing the cross of the title, despite moments of doubt he never wavered from his belief in the power of non-violence to bring about justice, this belief was powered by deep faith that he was doing work of a higher calling. I cannot imagine a better written biography of King’s work.

I will now start on Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The MLK book mostly explored the politics and social dimensions of race in the 1960s. I now want to look at the ‘6os through a cultural lens a la the psychedelic drug underground. Here is the run down of where the reading has taken me.1. American Movie Critics: this is an anthology of film criticism.2. The Immediate Experience by Robert Warshaw: I chose this book because Warshaw’s essays on Chaplin and on gangster films were two favorites in American Movie Critics.3. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller: Warshaw had a surprisingly negative essay of Death of a Salesman in The Immediate Experience.4. Rabbit, Run by John Updike. I chose this novel because Rabbit is a character like Biff Loman, a middle class man living in quiet desperation whose best days were in high school on a sports team.5. Rabbit, Redux by John Updike: I was taken with Rabbit and wanted to know what happened next.6. W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography of Race: I chose this biography of Du Bois because race relations played a major role in Rabbit, Redux set in the summer of 1969.7. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. – there is a direct line from Du Bois as leader of black America to King.
8. On to The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – chosen to stick with the theme of the radical ‘60s culture.

Monday March 12

5am-6am Morning Edition: liked the downtown Seattle housing story

6-6:30 - Read in my MLK biography -fascinating to read the accounts of Selma's 'Bloody Sunday' of 1965 after all the talk recently about Obama's and Clinton's anniversary speeches

4-4:30 All Things Considered - no stand out

5-5:30 more MLK biography on Selma aftermath and Johnson's speech where he proclaimed 'we shall over come'

6 - Simpsons DVD - Call of the Simpson from season one - the scenes with the RV salesman is the best

7 - Fresh Air podcast - on the military's use and perhaps abuse of psychotropic meds

7:30 Sherlock Holmes story

The Whistler

Media: Old-Time-Radio on CD
Title: The Whistler

Tonight I listened to another fantastic old-time radio show. The story was called "Whirlpool" first broadcast in 1948 on The Whistler radio program. But I do not want to talk about the fine tale of suspense. What struck tonight me was the advertising – in particular the idea of a single advertiser sponsoring a program. When I hear the title The Whistler I also know that Signal Oil is the advertiser. That’s amazing because I had never heard of Signal Oil before I began listening to The Whistler. The ad may be 20? 30? years too late for me, but I am a fan of Signal Oil. I also know all the advertisers for the other 50 and 60-year-old radio shows I listen to, even though they are produced mostly by companies that no longer exist. For example:
The Whistler – Signal Oil
Sherlock Holmes – Clipper Craft Clothing for Men
Dragnet – Chesterfield Cigarettes
Suspense – Roma Wine
The Great Gildersleve – Kraft Margarine
The Shadow – Blue Coal
And something even more interesting: do you know any company that advertised on any show you saw last week?
So besides being higher quality entertainment, old-time radio had more effective advertising as well.
“The Signal Oil Company brings you . . . The Whistler”.